Eugene Water & Electric Board (EWEB), the largest customer-owned utility in Oregon, has announced its selection of ArcFM Viewer for ArcGIS Engine to complement its ArcFM Solution implementation. EWEB provides electricity, water, and steam to more than 83,000 customers in the city of Eugene.
This summer, EWEB began implementing ArcFM, a facilities management application, and Responder, a GIS-based outage management system. This project brings together three disparate legacy applications into an enterprise system using the latest technology from ESRI and Miner & Miner. As the project evolved, EWEB recognized the necessity and benefits of having current facility information available in the GIS for both mobile and desktop users who do not require editing capabilities. ArcFM Viewer will provide a powerful yet economical small footprint mobile viewing option that will supply the necessary functionality for tracing, querying, and analyzing facility data. EWEB’s complete enterprise solution is scheduled to be in production by the end of 2005.
Kevin Biersdorff, GeoGraphics Supervisor for EWEB, said, “We believe ArcFM Viewer for ArcGIS Engine will provide a natural and painless way to bring facility data directly to those in the office and in the field making day-to-day business decisions. For many users, this tool will be all the GIS they'll ever need to solve problems and streamline their work.”
Orlando Utilities Commission (OUC – The Reliable One), the second largest locally owned utility in Florida, has chosen to implement ArcFM Viewer as a mobile application for both its water and electric departments. Home to Sea World, Universal Studios, and Walt Disney World, this quickly growing area serves more than 190,000 electric customers and 130,000 water customers in the city of Orlando and portions of Orange and Osceola Counties.
OUC has long recognized the advantages of using streamlined data through an integrated GIS solution. In 2001 it moved from a collection of disparate systems to ArcFM as the initial part of its overall vision for an enterprise, single architecture system. Its selection of ArcFM Viewer, which runs on ArcGIS Engine, will allow it to increase current functionality and data access across the organization.
Currently, users in the electric and water departments access data from different applications, which creates inefficiencies for dispatchers and workers in the field. Implementing ArcFM Viewer for both desktop and mobile users will eliminate complications from running separate systems.
“ArcFM Viewer meets our functionality requirements and will enable our dispatchers to use both water and electric data concurrently,” said Ron Hawkins, manager of Technical Services for OUC’s Water Department. “It also has the capability to expand along with the needs of our user community.”
The electric department also will use ArcFM Viewer and leverage the electric network tracing tools. “ArcFM Viewer will provide us with rapid access to shared resources and allow us to capitalize on tracing functions,” said Stewart Dary, manager of Technical Services for OUC’s Electric Department. “We anticipate our operations staff, trouble technicians, dispatchers, construction crews, design and system planning engineers, and managers will benefit from the extension of our GIS.”
OUC will begin a staged rollout of ArcFM Viewer in November and will be in full production by March 2006.
