Project Summary
Project Type:
EAM & WFMS Enhancement
Location:
Southern United States
Number of Customers:
2.9 million +
Applications:
To increase inspection efficiency with data-rich maps
Solutions Implemented:
EpochField Mobile
Customer Benefits:
Graphical, data-rich environment
Simple, cost-effective solution
One integrated solution
Introduction
Entergy Corporation is a Fortune 500 integrated energy company engaged primarily in electric power production and retail distribution operations. Entergy generates and distributes electric power to 2.9 million customers across Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Additionally, they distribute gas to 108,000 natural gas customers in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
Entergy embarked on the enterprise strategic initiative to modernize their electrical and gas operations by deploying an Enterprise Asset Management System (EAM) and a Workforce Management System (WFMS) across all Entergy Operating Companies.
Entergy selected EpochField initially to support its field inspections of gas assets in 2016. In 2018, as part of Entergy’s EAM initiative, Entergy selected Epoch Solutions Group to implement EpochField as their Mobile Workforce Management solution to be used by all their field crews for electric transmission & distribution, gas, and vegetation management.
The Challenge
Entergy’s EAM solution required that EpochField integrates with their legacy systems for GIS (GE Smallworld, ESRI), Asset Management System (Maximo), and Mobile Client Application (Click). The EAM program effort included multiple parallel efforts alongside the EpochField implementation effort, including building out Maximo as their central asset management platform, EpochField Work Management, and Click Scheduler with ClickMobile for scheduling and tracking their field agent work efforts, and TIBCO enterprise service bus for tying them together.
Entergy EAM Program is a multi-phase effort. The first phase involved deploying the EAM solution, addressing electric and gas requirements for the electric and gas distribution field crews; this was completed in January 2021. The second and ongoing phase started immediately after that, focusing on addressing the Transmission and Vegetation Management operations requirements. This final phase is planned to be completed by the end of 2021.
The Results
On December 7, 2020, EpochField was deployed into production for the electric and gas distribution field crews as part of the EAM Program at Entergy.
The business interrelationship aspects of Entergy’s EAM initiative are targeted to share this Work Order and asset information with other Entergy applications and offer opportunities for process improvement. It is anticipated a correlation of outage and damage information will offer opportunities to Entergy to improve existing processes and reduce overall storm response time producing significant financial benefits and external goodwill in the form of improved communication and public relations.
