Minnesota Power to Implement GE Energy Enterprise Management

Dec. 21, 2005
Minnesota Power, a division of Duluth, Minnesota-based ALLETE, Inc., has selected GE Energy’s PowerOn product suite as the enterprise outage management system solution for its electric division. The PowerOn suite includes several applications including ...

Minnesota Power, a division of Duluth, Minnesota-based ALLETE, Inc., has selected GE Energy’s PowerOn product suite as the enterprise outage management system solution for its electric division. The PowerOn suite includes several applications including PowerOn Dispatch, reliability reporting and a trouble call application. The product will integrate with existing applications, including Minnesota Power’s ESRI Geodatabase.

“The GE Energy PowerOn Outage Management System was chosen after a vigorous selection process because the product has highly developed functionality that will meet all of the objectives and requirements outlined in our RFP,” said Mike Cochran, OMS project manager for Minnesota Power. “Some of the key factors were: a reliable prediction engine, a robust call taking application, ability to communicate outage information back to our customers, an application level integration with our XA/21 SCADA System and an assurance that PowerOn will meet all of our reliability reporting needs when delivered.”

The PowerOn product suite will be integrated with applications such as work management, automated meter reading and GE Energy’s XA/21 energy management system. The project started in October 2005 and is scheduled to go live in the third quarter of 2006.

“The deciding factor in our decision was a proof of concept demo of the PowerOn System that was conducted using data converted from our ESRI GIS,” Cochran added. “We were impressed that GE Energy could convert the GIS for our entire service territory in a two-week period and successfully perform a variety of outage diagnoses based on test cases that we chose without GE’s prior knowledge. Favorable reference calls and a site visit to existing PowerOn customers also helped confirm this decision.”

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