CHALLENGE

For the modern electric utility, GIS is the hub from/into which many other important applications draw or share their data.  Some such interfacing applications include SAP, Autodesk products, Distribution Design Studio (DDS), Outage Management Systems (OMS), Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADMS), Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS), Synergi, PREconfiguring and Controlling Inverter Set-points (PRECISE), PowerClerk, and a variety of mobile applications for field workers.  Many times these applications will not have out-of-the-box interface utilities and require custom automated solutions to Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) the data between systems.

SOLUTION

The RYKER team has extensive experience successfully building GIS interfaces and custom automation at an enterprise level.  We have designed and implemented database interfaces using materialized views, tables, and other objects for applications like OMS, ADMS, PRECISE, and the Cable Fault Tracking database.  We have also built API interfaces using a variety of programming languages and frameworks.  One particularly complex interface was the ‘DER Loader’ tool that was created to load Distributed Energy Resource (DER) projects into GIS from the interconnection application program, PowerClerk. This interface incorporated an extensive database metadata model to allow for easy future configurations and maintenance for the C# / .NET DER Loader application.  We provided the utility the necessary expertise to configure and maintain the vendor-supported GIS interfaces, such as those for SAP, DDS, and Synergi.  

RESULT

The interfaces that we designed and implemented for the utility are active in the production environments and automated to refresh the data on a routinely scheduled basis.  These processes ensure data continuity throughout the enterprise and drastically reduced manual data migration efforts. For some of the interfaces, we designed self-recovering mechanisms to automatically identify interface errors and run systematic processes in an attempt to correct the issue based on the type of error.  These mechanisms help to maximize the uptime of the production systems and save critical IT resources support hours.