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UTILITIES it
May/June 1999
Copyright by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

BY John Javetski

Energy utilities hoping to automate their facilities management systems in time for retail competition may not realize just how time-consuming this job can be. Indeed, as the managers of Sprint Corp's Local Telecommunications Div (LTD), Westwood, Kansas, have learned, such projects-and their spinoffs- may take a full two decades to complete. For Sprint, the years required to convert tens of thousands of paper maps to digital data not only took their own toll on schedules, but caused what the military would call collateral damage. Because data conversion has taken so long, the Sprint project has also been delayed by changing computing paradigms and the fallout from company restructuring.

In the beginning. . .

When Sprint first started planning its automated mapping/facilities management (AM/FM) project in 1979, explains David Bryant (now regional manger for Sprint's western operations, but then on the company's national staff), the firm wasn't even called Sprint yet. It was United Telecommunications Corp, a strictly local service provider that had been cobbled together by putting dozens of "mom-and-pop" telephone companies - each with their own bureaucracies-under one roof. Only later did Sprint consolidate the autonomous firms into regional groups.

According to Bryant, one man was responsible for eliminating the "systems anarchy" that resulted from throwing the small phone companies together. In 1982, United Telephone (UT) of Florida, one of United Telecom's subsidiaries, chose Paul Arsenault (who is now general manager of Sprint's Florida region) to take its AM/FM project beyond the planning state. As Arsenault recalls, his task was daunting: Because UT of Florida was itself comprised of several mom-and-pops, data about the company's facilities were spread across 45,000 paper maps-some out of date-based on different standards. This chaotic situation of the early 1980s was becoming a serious impediment to business for two reasons: Florida's population was booming, and UT of Florida was ordered by the state Public Service Commission to create a continuing property record (CPR) data base to support and verify its rate structure.

So, in 1982, Arsenault kicked off Sprint's first AM/FM project, which was called mechanized-plant-in-place (MPIP) records and had a $12-million budget. His strategy for creating the needed CPR data base was a multi-step one: first automate all of UT of Florida's engineering drawings, then take the data created in the process and port it over to the company's accounting CPR system from IBM Corp, and finally establish a transaction processing method to keep the data updated and-in the process-eliminate the need for accounting personnel to enter data. Arsenault's IT arsenal at the time consisted of just two computers: a Digital Equipment Corp (DEC, now a part of Compaq) VAX/780, and a VAX-based Intergraph Corp mini-mainframe running UNIX.

Using these machines, Arsenault's team managed to convert all 45,000 of UT of Florida's paper maps to 65,000 goedata files between 1982 and 1984. But as they were finishing, they realized two things: that many of the converted records were out of date, and that in the interim they had amassed a backlog of 20,000 work orders. It took another two or three years-from 1984 to 1987-to catch up on posting the backlogged work orders, scrub the converted record, port it over to the accounting computer as a CPR, and set up the transaction process that would be used to post new property records and work orders.

Leveraging the effort

Once the records were scrubbed and the transaction process was up and running, Arsenault wanted to wring as much operational efficiency out of the new system as he could. So he embarked on a project called Teams, for telephone engineering and asset management system. Its goal was to eliminate the need for separate personnel to post records after engineers drew them. What the Teams project spawned was a workprint generation system that again used the Intergraph mini-mainframe, but this time to receive workprints generated by engineers using PC software. These data were then posted into the CPR by a digitizer.

After the Teams project got workprint generation up and running, the next problem Arsenault faced was how to distribute the records. He realized that a traditional, paper-based distribution scheme just wouldn't cut it as a solution. At the time, UT of Florida was producing more than 100,000 updates to it CPR annually, and each had to be delivered to the company's 1500 service technicians and field engineers.

As a result, Arsenault had to become a pioneer. Eschewing paper, in 1991 he and his team decided to try distributing map updates as software on some of the first CD-ROM's ever cut. This project-Sprint's third AM/FM-related one-was called MARS, for mobile automated record system. To make the scheme work, UT of Florida hired Phoenix Telecom to write a software program that would both allow headquarters to prepare record files so they could be burned into a CD, and a user to read it.

This, of course, meant that field personnel had to be given a means to read the CD-ROMs. So UT of Florida installed portable computers-in those days, portable were big and heavy enough to deserve the name "lunchboxes"-preloaded with MARS software in 1200 of its service trucks. Arsenault says the MARS project saved UT "at least a couple of million dollars a year in records production and distribution. And our users were elated with it, because now they could find anything they wanted simply by keying a piece of information instead of digging through paper records in the back of the truck."

New time, new platforms

By 1992, UT of Florida-which had recently been renamed Sprint Florida-was reaping the economic efficiencies produced by the three projects Arsenault had spearheaded. But the next year, changes in the telephone business and technology threw a wrench into the utility's mapping works. In 1993, Sprint acquired Centel Corp, giving Sprint Florida new territories up by Tallahassee and Fort Walton. But Centel's CPR used the new Intergraph TFIDS format that UT of Florida had been using for a decade. So Sprint Florida had to convert Centel's Framme records back to the TFIDS format, an in-house project that took a year or two.

Time and technology evolution also took their toll that year. By then, Sprint Florida realized that its computers were old and heading for extinction. It had the VAX/780 it bought in 1982, a VAX/8700 of 1987 vintage, and VAX/6800 that had been Centel's. But DEC wasn't making VAXs any more, and Sprint Florida's two machines were "falling apart," recalls Arsenault. "I had to cannibalize one to keep the other going, because you could no longer buy parts for them."

Clearly, the situation called for another bold move. Sprint Florida wanted to jettison its centralized VAXs-including the one at the heart of its Intergraph mini-mainframe-in favor of the hot, new, distributed-PC computing topology called client/server. So it hired Byers Engineering Co, Atlanta, Ga, to write a routine that would migrate its records from the TFIDS platform to a client/server environment in which Byers' Engineering Work Order (EWO) platform could work.

This wasn't the first time that Sprint had done business with Byers. Back in 1987, Sprint LTD corporate-where David Bryant was on staff-contracted with Byers to develop a desktop version of the Intergraph TFIDS platform, which was VAX-based and required an expensive UNIX workstation to run. Says Bryant, "Our decision to work with Byers again was based more on our wanting to enter into a long-term business relationship with them than on a competitive analysis of the technology options available to us. After all, Byers Engineering was one of the pioneers of records conversion, which is what I call the "big ugly"-it's expensive, disruptive, and time-consuming."

Planting another stake

Also working in Byers' favor was the company's history of doing out-sourced data conversion for all of Sprint's autonomous divisions. "Back in 1982, before Sprint went regional," Bryant explains, "[Arsenault's] United Telephone of Florida was independently pursuing AM/FM technology. But so were United Telephone of Texas, UT of the Southeast, and UT of Ohio. No one was cooperation or coordinating their activities, and as a result there was a complete lack of standards. Eventually, the corporate entity did rope in all the subsidiaries and say "we're all going to do this [create and adhere to a data standard based on Intergraph VAX technology] together." That was a major milestone-a stake in the ground, as we called it."

Another stake was planted when Sprint LTD corporate mandated that all its regional entities standardize on the Byers EWO suite. According to Arsenault, "Back in 1995 or so, we spent about a million dollars migrating 100,000 records maps to the EWO platform [running under Windows NT], which is where we sit today."

MapViewer, a Byers' product that runs under Windows NT , is also a Sprint LTD national standard. Says Arsenault, "In 1997, we realized that the "lunchbox" computers we bought for the guys in the field in 1992 and 1993 were really getting long in the tooth-MARS was a DOS-based system. So we took MapViewer and just this year finished migrating all of our 2000 user/subscribers in Florida over to it. All of our data have been converted, except for a few wire centers in North Carolina and the Midwest. But they're coming along quickly, so pretty soon we'll have the whole nation converted and on EWO 5.0." Bryant confirms that, saying, "we're 98% done, and will be finished by the end of the year."

Never done

But in today's competitive utility environment, IT projects like Sprint LTD's mapping odyssey are never really "finished." According to Bryant, "we've gone from systems anarchy through data conversion to establishing a data standard and a standard based on a commercial, open data base platform. Now we're facing the challenge of systems/data integration-and training-at a national level."