iFactor Consulting has been awarded a contract to provide immediate and ongoing PowerOn support and maintenance for Colorado Springs Utilities. This involves maintenance of all operations of the critical 24×7 Outage Management System. iFactor consultants conduct daily system health and status checks, debug network model and other issues, and ensure PowerOn is running optimally. The daily checks proactively find problems before they have a chance to impede normal operations. iFactor staff are also available after hours and during major events to monitor the system and ensure optimal health and performance.
In addition, to better support their data and ensure more accurate reporting, Springs Utilities purchased iFactor’s exclusive PowerOn Data Toolkit which is comprised of the aptly named “EZ Archiver” and the Data Scrubbing Tool (DST). The EZ Archiver enhances the GE product by running archive processes directly from Oracle to Oracle without passing through the Smallworld ACP. This alone increases performance tenfold. The EZ Archiver is easy to run, easy to maintain, and contains multiple checks to ensure there is no data loss. The DST allows for post closure modification of critical outage data, including start and restore times, phase, device, number of customers, and most importantly, regenerates customer interrupt records based on these changed values. The DST ensures that no matter what happened to the data in PowerOn, the numbers will be correct for final reporting to state agencies and other organizations.
Colorado Springs Utilities (www.csu.org) employs more than 1,800 people and provides electricity, natural gas, water and wastewater services to the growing Pikes Peak region of Colorado. Springs Utilities’ service area spans 500 square miles and encompasses residential, industrial, commercial and military/government customers.
iFactor Consulting will be demonstrating a number of new solutions and products at the GE Smallworld Users Conference this year in September. Stop by booth 20 to see us in action! Below are just a handful of items we’ll be discussing, and as always, we’re ready to answer any of your questions and provide solutions to all of your problems.
Proactive Outage Communications
iFactor’s Notifi interfaces to PowerOn to provide a complete customer communications solution. See how Notifi can alert customers to predicated and confirmed outages, update them on ETR and restoration information, and even allow customers to report an outage with just a few key strokes using our innovative 2-way texting interface.
Web Maps Connector Features: Weather Information, Parcel Layers, and Route Finder
The Web Maps Connector product has two new datasets in its growing library of basemaps. The first is parcel boundary data from Digital Map Products. With this new layer in WMC, users can view parcel boundaries in Smallworld, and future releases of WMC will enable users to select these parcel boundaries for detailed attributes. The second is Doppler Radar from WeatherBug. With this layer, users can easily see which of their assets are being subject to severe weather events. In addition, the animation feature shows weather data up to three hours back. Finally, WMC also includes the Route Finder. This GUI uses the Bing Routing Web Service to provide directions between multiple waypoints. A user can add waypoints by using the trail or by selecting geometries on the map. The result is a highlighted route on the map that shows the shortest path between each waypoint.
Storm Center Outage Maps
Come check out the industry leading outage maps solution to see the latest developments with this product suite. We’ll be showing the latest integration with weather data, support for reviewing historical information, advanced features to managed ETR information, and iPhone integration for the product.
Cross Phasing in PowerOn
Ever needed to restore an outage with a phase other than the original phase? Core PowerOn doesn’t allow it, but with the Cross-phasing module from iFactor, you can feed a de-energized single-phase with some other single-phase. Customers are properly restored on the new phase. And when the cross-phased situation is removed, everything goes back to normal.
Our team at iFactor Consulting is prepared for another exciting and action-packed GE Smallworld Americas Users Conference. Come visit us in booth 20 to hear about our latest developments, ranging from weather layers in the Web Maps Connector product to cross phasing in PowerOn. We’ll be ready to answer all of your questions and show you demonstrations of our newest solutions and products. Keep an eye on our blog and Twitter page over the next few weeks as we announce some of the demos that will be available during the conference.
Also, don’t forget to enter our iPad giveaway! Stop by the booth for a demo and give us a business card, or simply Tweet about @iFactor or the #swuc! The winners will be announced via our Twitter feed by the closing conference session on Saturday.
iFactor will be sponsoring this year’s opening cocktail reception on Thursday – we look forward to seeing you there!
Central Hudson recently implemented iFactor’s EZ Archiver product. The project had been delayed over the winter due to record-setting storms that tore through most of New England, and EZ Archiver finally went into production in May.
The EZ Archiver product eliminates the need for an additional Smallworld Server License and speeds up the archive process by moving data from Oracle to Oracle without having to pass through Smallworld Oracle ACP. The product also allows for better logging and error trapping, with no missed projects; an entire project either passes or fails, with no partial project archiving like the core PowerOn module.
In addition, iFactor Consulting’s Greg Ziolkowski converted the production archive PowerOn data to the new EZ Archive system for ease of maintenance (to archive data in one source versus older data in PowerOn and newer data in EZ Acrhiver) and to utilize EZ Archiver’s EZ naming structures. Central Hudson also wrote a series of database views against the EZ Archiver schema to mimic the tables that were in PowerOn, which eliminated any changes or upgrades to their existing reporting structures.
For more information on EZ Archiver, data migration & conversion, and other exciting products from the iFactor team, contact us at sales@ifactorconsulting.com!
A recent update to the web maps Connector adds the ability to sort a set of waypoints into the optimal order. With this functionality, you can take any set of points and find the ideal way to visit each one – the infamous traveling salesman problem. Here is an example with 4 different locations to visit, entered from our “Todo list”. The route looks like this (note that the total distance is 2.67 miles and estimated to take 9 minutes 31 seconds)…
A Route Before Sorting/Optimizing
… but then I want to see if I can make the trip more efficiently. I click the “Sort” button and the results are…
The Sorted/Optimized Route
In this case, the WMC Route Finder suggested a route which minimizes the travel time with a trip distance of only 2.086 miles and travel time of 8 minutes 39 seconds.
I think this is really cool. Kudos to Greg Cahill and the iFactor Development team for getting this really cool WMC sorting routine working!!! Contact sales@ifactorconsulting.com to learn more.
