Client: Dakota Electric Association
Location: Minnesota

Dakota Electric Association envisioned a way to work “smarter” by leveraging their existing geographic information system (GIS) and outage management systems (OMS) into a central system that could accommodate a number of previously isolated business practices. POWER understood this electric cooperative’s technical challenges, work processes, budget constraints, and the need to do more with existing resources. POWER’s system integration expertise and GIS and work management system experience enabled Dakota Electric to move forward with a vision and a plan to deliver the most value to its members by improving operational performance, member service and workforce efficiency.

Dakota Electric continues to rely on POWER for project management of on-going operational projects related to GIS, SCADA, Load Management, Outage Management and system integrations. POWER’s strategic consultant plays an advisory role in strategic planning on all systems used for operations.

Accomplishments

• Increased workforce efficiency and improved member service using a number of new hardware and software solutions.
• Centralized data approach reduced costly redundancy and created more cohesive functionality – from managing service requests and simplifying as-built processes to restoring outages more quickly.
• The level of integration allows all system users to interact with greater efficiency in the design and work order process.
• Dakota Electric achieved its goal for an integrated enterprise GIS, outage management and work/asset management solution.

Project Features

• Developed a logical system architecture for GIS-based work management.
• Identified all major software components and integration points and documented the existing workflows.
• Helped manage the implementation and integration of these systems (Schneider Electric’s Designer and Responder outage management; Cityworks asset management; GO! Sync mobile GIS; and Lawson’s financial systems).
• Improved attribute information used for electric modeling studies and asset management.

POWER Services

• Project charter, needs assessment and strategic planning services
• Business workflow process documentation
• System requirements and functional gap analysis
• Environment planning, system architecture and high-level design
• Data modeling and mapping
• Master project plan development and management
• ArcFM customizations
• Cityworks set up, configuration, and interface development
• GIS interfaces (AVL and Milsoft Windmil)
• Custom applications for Cityworks (dashboards, scheduler, and notifier)
• Moodle training management system setup, course development and end-user training
• Data migration from a variety of legacy data sources