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8/13/2015
I.T., Not Just Elbow Grease, Help Utility’s Recovery
I.T., Not Just Elbow Grease, Help Utility’s Recovery
By Bob Violino | Posted 2006-01-14
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The electricity distributor restored service in Septem ber 2005 to its
Mississippi custom ers w ithin 12 days, instead of 28. A system to
find critical docum ents offered an assist.
Talk about being proactive.
Southern Co., the energy company that produces
electricity for much of the Gulf Coast region, began
preparing for Hurricane Katrina more than a year before
the storm struck.
In fact, even before Katrina’s predecessor, Ivan, roared
across Alabama in September 2004, Southern began
taking steps to meet worst-case scenarios, relying on an
enterprise content management platform to ensure that engineers could get immediate access to design
plans of electrical substations and other power equipment.
Workers at two utilities under the umbrella of Southern Co.—Gulf Power and Mississippi Power—took
drawings of substations from the company’s new content management database and burned the
information onto CDs. The company’s substation design group then distributed the CDs and laptop PCs
to field engineers responsible for each of the substations.
After hurricanes Ivan and Katrina hit, engineers in the field were able to immediately access the design
plans to begin work to restore power, including repairing damaged substations. Previously, engineers or
maintenance workers would have to physically track down plans from a file, a process that took an
average of two hours, according to Holly Godfrey, technical consultant at Southern Co. With the new
setup, documents could be obtained within minutes.
While some workers viewed data to rebuild assets in the affected regions, others used the plans to buy
specific parts and equipment. That enabled them to restore power faster, Godfrey says.
In fact, after Hurricane Katrina, all of Mississippi Power’s 195,000 customers lost electricity, and two-thirds
of the subsidiary’s transmission and distribution was damaged or destroyed, according to utility
executives. Power was restored to Mississippi Power customers within 12 days. Initially, utility workers
estimated the work would be done within four weeks, according to a published report.
Southern CEO David Ratcliffe said the company’s quick response to the outage was the result of several
factors—most important, the company was prepared to respond to a disaster in its hurricane-prone
territory. Though he did not single out the content management system, Ratcliffe on Nov. 16 told the
Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs: “At a high level, our success can be
attributed to extensive pre-planning, excellent execution of a well-defined plan and significant help.”
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Southern Co., one of the largest electricity generators in the U.S., has 272 coal, oil, gas and hydro
generating units at 68 power plants. It provides electricity to more than 4 million customers in Alabama,
Georgia and parts of Mississippi and Florida.
Southern’s operating companies, divisions and departments generate and share millions of documents,
which range from engineering drawings of plant assets such as boilers to personnel data. Which is where
content management enters the picture. In general, the software enables employees at organizations to
create, store, revise and access information from the desktop as well as from enterprise applications
such as supply chain and customer relationship management.
Until late 2002, Southern’s power generating operations used a hodgepodge of custom applications and
legacy systems to store and access digital content, as well as old-fashioned filing cabinets to store paper
documents.
Digital information resided in any number of places—mainframe applications, homegrown databases and
on local area networks. With no central location in which to store content, Southern had no control over
versions of documents and drawings, and no way to easily identify the current version of a given
document or keep track of who had access to which information. As an example, in the energy business,
standards procedures change frequently. Under Southern’s former decentralized catch-as-catch-can
approach, an engineer had no sure way of knowing if the procedures being deployed were current or
outdated.
Other content, particularly older information, existed solely on paper. That not only kept storage costs
high, but made it difficult and time consuming for people to locate items. When technicians needed to
replace an element at a power plant—a boiler, for example—they needed to locate documentation on the
boiler itself as well as on all related systems. That often involved physically looking for paperwork,
because much of the older content hadn’t been converted to digital form.
“When we’d bring in contractors to help with upgrades or outages, they didn’t know where to look” for
information, says Godfrey, the technical consultant at Southern. Engineers and maintenance workers on
average had spent two hours per day looking for content such as drawings, according to Godfrey. The
cost in terms of productivity was high; employees lost time that could have been spent on initiatives such
as plant upgrades or repairs. Even more important, the difficulty of locating content often hampered
efforts to restore power after outages.
In November 2002, Southern deployed an enterprise content management platform from Documentum
(since acquired by EMC Corp.) across its 71 fossil-fuel and hydro plants, as well as its generation and
energy-marketing business units, to support more than 7,000 geographically dispersed employees and
contractors. Vendor manuals, engineering drawings and maintenance data were among the 2 million
documents moved to the Documentum system for central storage.
A goal—and result—of the implementation: speed up the amount of time it takes for Southern employees
to locate information. How much more efficiently? The average search time for engineering drawings has
improved from two hours per day to less than 10 minutes, according to Godfrey. The success rate for
finding the right content on the first try increased from 50% in 2002 to 90% by 2005.
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Page 3 – I.T., Not Just Elbow Grease, Help Utility’s Recovery
Setting up the content-management system, which involved
2 million documents, presented some challenges. Before loading content into Documentum, Southern
had to match data from one legacy system with a second one. The former system was a database with
text data related to drawings, but no images; the latter contained drawings without the related text.
Drawings had to be matched with text. From there, the corresponding drawings and text were loaded into
Documentum using a tool called DocLoader from McLaren Software. Over three months, three workers
spent 75% of their time, and another worker 25% of his time, to get this match and load the information.
Volume testing and tweaking of hardware was required to maximize the throughput of the new system,
Godfrey says. And Southern had to train thousands of employees; key personnel at each Southern
location that used the system attended four-hour sessions. Southern also developed a half-hour video
training program, and offered instruction in an auditorium-style group setting at remote locations.
Southern also retained Gimmal Group of Houston, a consultancy, to help plan its enterprise architecture
design to support the content management system, including a server farm with Windows-based Web, file
and content servers and a separate Oracle database.
Once the Documentum system was in place, Southern’s geographically dispersed employees immediately
gained faster and easier access to content, including vendor manuals, engineering drawings,
maintenance data on plant assets, standard operating procedures and departmental documents.
Southern achieved its goal of consolidating data and retiring legacy applications, and today there’s only
one place from which employees can access generation drawings and other content. Three legacy
systems were retired, resulting in savings of $40,000 per year through the elimination of administration
and hardware and software maintenance costs.
Shandeon Logan, a senior technician in the document services department at Southern Co. Generation,
a business unit that operates the company’s fossil-fuel (non-nuclear) power plants, says the elimination
of steps in searching for content has made the department more productive.
Check out eWEEK.com’s for the latest utility computing news, reviews and analysis.
When Southern was still relying on legacy systems, Logan says, engineers looking for drawings had to
first search one system to find a drawing number and then key the number into a second system to
access the drawing. The Documentum setup combines these functions, saving time and reducing the
likelihood of errors.
After seeing the results the content management deployment was bringing, other business units at
Southern, including information technology, supply chain management, marketing and transmission,
moved content from their own local networks and storage systems to the new platform. There are now
about 9,500 people using the system throughout the 26,000-employee organization.
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to I.T.”>
The expanded use of the platform has brought further benefits. One is that Southern overcame the
geographical limitations of its regional operating companies by providing for the first time an electronic,
central repository of vendor contracts. This has eliminated the time spent looking for, copying and mailing
paper contracts.
“Plant support personnel find design documentation is much easier to locate since the data and
functionality of the legacy systems were consolidated in Documentum,” says Jeff Pruitt, a senior
information systems analyst who supports Southern Generation. “Before this implementation, a search for
the current version of a document sometimes necessitated searching up to four legacy systems, and
possibly paper and microfilm.”
Perhaps most important for a power company, the content management system has led to increased
reliability of its services to customers, because employees are better equipped to solve problems.
A Baseline analysis of major power outages in the U.S. shows that Southern Co. has restored power
faster than other utilities (see “Quick on Its Feet,” above). In 2004, Southern Co. responded to eight
power outages, restoring electricity, on average, within 1 day and 20 hours. Of 65 other major
disturbances affecting 37 utilities elsewhere in the U.S. the same year, it took an average of 3 days and 5
hours to restore power.
Southern declines to say how much it spent on the content management implementation, citing a nondisclosure agreement with Documentum. The company recently upgraded from version 4 of the system to
version 5.2.5, which includes a new Web interface.
Tony Byrne, founder of CMS Watch, a Silver Spring, Md., consulting firm that specializes in content
management technology, says it’s difficult to estimate how much a project of this type would cost because
vendors tend to charge different rates for different customers. But he says the entire project, including
consulting and maintenance services, probably cost “from the high six figures to the low seven figures.”
Measuring a return on investment for content management systems can also be difficult, Byrne says.
“When you’re talking about managing electronic documents, it’s often very hard to prove an ROI,” he
explains. “It tends to be a cost of doing business,” where a company needs the technology in order to be
more agile or to improve records management.
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Page 5 – I.T., Not Just Elbow Grease, Help Utility’s Recovery
. Base Case”>
Headquarters: 270 Peachtree St. N.W., Atlanta, GA 30303
Phone: (404) 506-5000
Business: Operates Alabama Power, Georgia Power, Gulf Power, Mississippi Power and Savannah
Electric.
Chief Information Officer: Rebecca Blalock
Financials in 2004: $11.9 billion in revenue; $1.53 billion in net income.
Challenge: Manage more than 2 million documents and other content, from technical manuals to
engineering drawings of boilers and other plant assets, and enable employees in far-flung locations to
easily access the information.
BASELINE GOALS:
Reduce average time spent finding content such as engin-eering drawings, from two hours to less than 10
minutes.
Increase the rate of success in finding the right content on the first try, from 50% to 90%.
Save $40,000 a year by eliminating three legacy systems.
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Questions 1) Why do you think content management is such a critical part of Southern
Company’s strategy?
2) To what extent do you think Southern Co’s predicament of information overload is typical for
organizations?
3) What lessons learned and insights from the chapter 3’s discussion on collaboration tools
could help promote Southern Co’s adoption and use of its content management initiative? In the
present day, how can the company use social media for a similar situation?
…
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