When I Got Word, I Just had to Investigate. I heard that Sunflower Electric is upgrading its enterprise resource management and asset management systems — and here is the coolest part: The utility is warehousing both its data and the new Oracle R12 suite of products on Oracle servers located in Austin, Texas.

This is the first instance I am aware of where an electric utility has decided to go cold turkey and go online. After the Oracle phase-in, not only will Sunflower be one of the first electric utilities to use the new R12 suite of products, but it also will be the first electric utility to use Internet browsers to access its enterprise suite of services.

A LITTLE ABOUT SUNFLOWER

Sunflower is a generation and transmission utility in central and western Kansas serving six electric distribution cooperatives in 55 counties. Sunflower delivers wholesale power generated at its 10 power plants to member utilities across a transmission network consisting of 73 substations and more than 2262 miles (3640 km) of 69-kV, 115-kV, 138-kV, 230-kV and 345-kV lines.

I tracked down Jerry Herman, Sunflower's senior manager of information systems, to gain a little perspective. Herman tells me that Sunflower is going with Oracle partly because of the increased functionality in the new R12 suite, but also because of Oracle's “on-demand” capability with everything housed on Oracle servers. Here is Herman's rationale: “Including me, Sunflower has only six IT people serving 360 employees. And our information services department has to fight for manpower and resources just like every other department. If we were to maintain the Oracle suite on our own servers, we would need more iron and more people. And we find it really tough to convince IT people to relocate to Hays, Kansas, a city out in the middle of the plains with a population of 20,000.”

In early phases of the rollout, Sunflower will have access to traditional business functions, including payroll, accounting, procurement and billing. Later phases will provide solutions for the operations folk. I called Keith Overland, Sunflower's manager of transmission, to get his take. Overland finds the flexibility inherent in the Oracle Enterprise Asset Management tools quite enticing. He is convinced Sunflower will be able to tailor the system to meet the needs of his department.

States Overland, “I've participated in dozens of meetings to decide what functionality we want. Our goal is to streamline operations so that we can provide the right information to the right people, enabling us to shift decision-making down to the appropriate levels in our organization. One feature automatically populates codes so our line people will never need to know an account number again. And since our field crews can log information online using tablet PCs (one reason Sunflower went with the R12 suite), they will no longer have to do any paper filing. And we can also put breaker maintenance schedules and breaker vendor manuals online that we can access anytime from anywhere. We are also warehousing data on our pole fleet with each pole numbered and categorized. So when a pole goes down, we can determine how it was configured and quickly gather all the materials needed by the crews to restore service.”

SYSTEM ROLLOUT

Sunflower hired the Signum Group to implement the Oracle R12 rollout. Signum not only assisted in identifying best practices, but also helped tailor existing Oracle applications to meet the utility's needs. Also considered was Signum's track record with Oracle, having been involved in more than 100 successful deployments since 1994.

I briefly met with Terry Myers, the Signum Group project manager who is handling the Sunflower rollout. I might have caught her at a hectic moment, but since her profession is deployments, I expect most of her moments are hectic. Anyway, Myers (quite task oriented) was focused on getting consensus on deliverables. Myers says four full-time Signum Group staff are employed on the Oracle rollout, spending three-quarters of their time in Sunflower offices. Additional Signum staff are brought in as needed. Because Signum has Oracle database administrators on staff, Sunflower is spared the expense of recruiting, training and retaining a staffer with these skills.

The rollout is taking place over an 18-month time frame, with the first applications going live in the first quarter of 2008. It is expected that 45 of the 360 Sunflower employees will use Oracle products on a day-to-day basis, with additional Sunflower employees having access as appropriate.

Jerry and his colleagues are working hard to implement this new system so Sunflower will have at its disposal an innovative, first-in-class enterprise management system, a system that will enable it to move many time-consuming functions to the background. This will allow the team at Sunflower to focus even more attention on delivering superior service at a reasonable cost, a goal that has not changed for 50 years.