Orlando Utilities Commission has further leveraged its ArcFM GIS solution with the Fiber Manager fiber optic application. This integrated solution is helping the utility capture complete documentation of its fiber infrastructure and meet federal-level reliability standards.
OUC is the second largest municipally owned electric utility in the state of Florida and the 16th largest in the United States, providing electric, water, and chilled water services throughout the fast-growing City of Orlando; the popular Sea World, Universal Studios, and Walt Disney World attractions; and adjoining portions of Orange County. In 2003, the utility went live with Telvent’s ArcFM enterprise Geographic Information System (GIS) - developed on the ESRI ArcGIS platform - to standardize facility asset data that were contained in multiple, disparate information systems and maps. To capitalize on this centralized geodatabase, OUC added ArcFM Viewer on ArcGIS Engine in 2006 to make current asset data available to field users for safe maintenance and prompt outage response.
Most recently, OUC added the Telvent Fiber Manager application to map the utility’s 570-mile fiber cable network within the GIS. In little more than two months after project kickoff, communications technicians not previously familiar with GIS were using the solution’s integrated and intuitive toolset to digitize network connectivity and build traceable network circuits available across the entire utility. It is proving to be a practical means of capturing previously undocumented fiber network details, reported Byron Knibbs, vice president of OUC’s Energy Delivery Business Unit and champion of secession planning at the Florida utility.
“We are seeing a lot of folks with domain knowledge getting ready to retire,” he said, referring to highly experienced employees who carry network details in their heads. “We are taking advantage of this intuitive application to document the network, end-to-end, before those employees leave.”
At the same time, noted Joe Reilly, Manager of Communication Systems, Fiber Manager also fortifies the utility’s dig-in planning ability and helps it comply with standards established by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a self-regulatory organization subject to oversight by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). NERC standards are the planning and operating rules that electric utilities follow to ensure the most reliable system possible.
“The Fiber Manager solution helps us meet the NERC mandate to identify critical infrastructure assets such as fibers between relay sets and fibers supporting our SCADA,” Reilly emphasized. “This mapping and tracing ability allows us to protect the network and implement secession planning at the same time.”
