CASE STUDY: Foundation for Asset Management and the Future

Case Study

Foundation for Asset Management and the Future

The utility client of Xtensible is one of the largest community-owned electric utility company in the United States with a customer base of over 1 million delivering:

Electric
Water
Sewer
Reclaimed water
Chilled Water

Partnering with Xtensible for consulting services:

Architecture & Strategy
Enterprise Information Management
Data Architecture & Modeling
Technical Design

Business Value

Analytics Platform Data Architecture
Enterprise Asset Management
Data Management and Governance Framework

OPPORTUNITY

The vision of the utility client is to operate their business to best serve their customers. This vision includes advancing the usage of their data to enable digital transformation pertaining to how the data is integrated, stored, accessed and utilized for reporting and enterprise analytics, and through canonical APIs for a new mobile app. The integration solution supports streaming and a robust set of canonical APIs with rigorous data governance. The design established a central enterprise data repository (a.k.a. “foundation data layer”), with a data access layer serving data consumers on demand. The logical data model for both the canonical APIs and the foundation data layer is a common Enterprise Semantic Model (ESM), providing consistent data semantics for both data-in-motion and data-at-rest. The ESM data model is based on the IEC CIM model and is managed through a data governance process. Establishing a common definition and data management framework that enables users to make efficient use of the data. Reporting and analytics must support various customer technologies and include latest advanced analytics technology with possibility for future expansion to meet changing business needs.

THE APPROACH

The start of the journey focuses on enterprise asset management, asset data architecture design as well as the data management framework and methodologies to develop a holistic overall approach for enterprise asset management linked with business intelligence and analytics. This work was driven based on the utility corporate vision and goals, targeting the Golden Record for and the 360 Degree view of assets. Xtensible worked closely with the utility to assess existing processes, systems, data quality, and the maturity level of their enterprise asset data management and laid a foundation for a comprehensive:

Systems Vision
Data architecture
Execution plan
Business Design

The plan incorporate how to integrate processes and data across desperate systems for assets and eliminating the need for multiple data entries and present a single version of the truth. A comprehensive data architecture for asset data management was developed to include core foundational components such as data principles, current and future architecture, gap analysis, constraints, technical requirements and interoperability requirements

ASSET 360 INFORMATION MODEL

The interoperability requirement for the asset management solution was designed by Xtensible through the development of a the Utility Information Model and laid the foundation for future extension into other subject areas such as Work, Meter, Customer, Operations Measurement and Network Connectivity Model.

The solution integrates applications such as Asset and Maintenance Work Management, Financial, GIS, Data Historian, Outage Management, meter data management, laboratory information management systems to name a few including the data visualization and analytics.

Results

The extended Enterprise Asset Management Teams, maintenance, operations, planning, procurement, and Capex/Opex decision makers where the primary beneficiaries of this initial engagement. But this initial focus on EAM did not prevent the teams from keeping the long-term strategic focus of Enterprise Information Management Journey in mind.

“Enter data once and use it many times provides the direction to perform the complete ongoing collation, storing, and sharing of all asset information with all corporate system. The information collection begins before the asset is even procured and continues through out the life-cycle of the asset. The architecture developed for the asset ‘golden record’ is an enterprise deign and architecture that is reusable for developing other ‘golden records’ such as customer, meter and others”, stated by Phillip Jones, VP of Solution Development from Xtensible.

WHAT IS HAPPENING NEXT?

Xtensible continues to provide professional services to the client for:

Enterprise Information Management
Data Architecture & Data Modeling
Business Intelligence & Data Analytics
System Integration Design

Together we have continued to expand utilizing an agile workflow, and a loosely-coupled architecture with a Common Information Model approach to give business users a unified asset view, comprehensive analytics, and visualization based on the developed roadmap.

Technologies