CPS Energy of San Antonio is now in production using Telvent Miner & Miner’s ArcFM for land and electric distribution and is in the development phase for the implementation of gas transmission and distribution. Also underway is the Designer project that will include integration to Logica’s WMIS. CPS Energy is the nation’s largest municipally owned energy company providing both natural gas and electric service. It serves more than 650,000 electric customers and more than 312,000 natural gas customers in and around San Antonio, Texas.

In November 2004, CPS Energy selected Telvent Miner & Miner (TM&M), together with ESRI and ABB, to implement an enterprise GIS and Outage Management Solution (OMS). CPS Energy wanted to move from its legacy system to a modern GIS integrated with OMS for the purposes of simplifying the design process, providing mobile design functionality, aiding in work crew management, and enhancing overall customer service. The GIS is integrated with several other vendor technologies including ABB’s OMS, CYME’s CymDist, and Advantica’s SynerGEE applications that allowed disparate processes to converge, enabling design, maintenance, and responses to occur within one streamlined system.

CPS Energy also has a near real-time integration with ArcFM and SAP’s Customer Care System (CCS) and Plant Maintenance (PM) modules. This allows CPS Energy to perform planned maintenance activities in ArcFM using information from SAP. The interface also references daily consumption information in SAP, allowing ArcFM to carry out transformer load management studies. Other customer information from SAP is also referenced and updated in ArcFM.

CPS Energy has 35 editors and 200 viewers accessing the system and expects to have 130 designers in 2007. By implementing GIS, CPS Energy realized many benefits including improved design standardization, reduced design vs. construction variance, improved map and asset record accuracy and timeliness, reduced underground locate liability, and improved engineering analysis support.

Fred James, vice president of engineering said, “ArcFM provides CPS Energy the graphical asset management within one system to efficiently maintain facilities and assets while integration to the other systems provides information and reduces duplication of data.”