The Public Utility District No.1 of Clallam County (Clallam PUD) is in full production with Telvent Miner & Miner's ArcFM GIS and Responder Outage Management System (OMS) application. These tools were implemented to help the PUD meets its mission of providing reliable and safe utility services in a financially and environmentally responsible manner.
Clallam PUD, in northwest Washington State, was researching utility GIS in 2006 when several severe, back-to-back storms late that year prompted the utility to consider a solution that would include outage management. It selected ArcFM GIS to make facility asset data available across the district’s electric, water, and fiber broadband services - knowing that ArcFM tools for design, outage, network, and asset management would help extend the value of the GIS database. ArcFM 9.2 was deployed in late fall of 2007, and the Responder 9.2 OMS solution, coupled with a front-end Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) system, went into production in December, 2007, to serve the utility’s 28,000 electric customers.
“Responder had a significant test during an outage the next month,” explained Steve Schopfer, Clallam PUD IT manager. “After just a few calls, Responder’s prediction engine correctly identified the fuse bank involved and traced out an area of about 500 customers who were actually affected. It saved us several hours in restoration.” Schopfer added that Responder is used not only by Clallam PUD dispatchers but also by the utility’s answering service.
“Responder production went smoothly, and our staff embraced it readily. Everyone, including our customers, will benefit from better allocation of resources during an outage.”
Clallam PUD anticipates implementation of other ArcFM tools that leverage the solution’s utility-wide geodatabase, including Designer and Work Flow Manager, in the near future.
