asset management

Blending
Solutions
A GEORGIA CO-OP GOES “BEST-OF-BREED.”
By Warren Causey
Cobb Electric Membership Corp.(EMC), in Marietta, Ga.,
is atypical of cooperative utilities in the United States. With its service
territory located in one of the fastest-growing areas of suburban
Atlanta, it’s larger than most co-ops with approximately 180,000 electric
customers and more than 100,000 natural gas customers — all captured
after the Georgia natural gas market was deregulated in July 1988.
Cobb EMC also has morphed over the last 10 years from a traditional
electric co-op to a multi-product company that sells everything
from electricity and natural gas to local and long-distance telephone
service, Internet service, home security, and more.
To deal with its exploding list of services, Cobb EMC formed Cobb
Energy Management Corp. (Cobb Energy) in 1997, a for-profit entity
formed to be an aggregator of services for the membership of Cobb
EMC and others.
By 2003, it became obvious that Cobb EMC’s Orcom Customer
Information System, which handled everything from financials and
billing to tracking assets in the field, needed updating.
“That software really served us well through the years, but the
way our company looked in 1995 [when the Orcom CIS was installed]
and today is totally different,” says Steve Paolucci, associate vice
president of finance at Cobb Energy. “The old monolithic software just
couldn’t handle it anymore.”
As a result of that impasse, Cobb Energy began exploring enterprisewide
asset management software in 2003. In 2004, it began installing a
new set of solutions. Most software and hardware for the entire enterprise,
including the original co-op, now reside with Cobb Energy.
“When we went into this project, we had hoped we could find one piece
of software that could do everything we needed done,” Paolucci says.
The fact that it didn’t work out that way is typical of many utilities
in the United States — they haven’t been fertile ground for the large
enterprise computing firms like Waldorf, Germany’s SAP.
“We started with five or seven different options and narrowed it
down to three: Lawson Software, St. Paul, Minn., PeopleSoft [now an
Orcom subsidiary], and SAP,” Paolucci says. “We did intense sessions
with those companies, gave them our requirements, and asked
whether they could meet our needs out of the box, with minor modifications
or major modifications.”
42 ENERGYBIZ MAGAZINE July/August 2005
That process, which was assisted by Capstone Consulting Partners,
now a subsidiary of Alliance Data Systems, of Dallas, extended through
last summer. However, none of the companies could satisfy Cobb Energy’s
needs completely, Paolucci says. At that point, the utility decided
to go with a “best of breed” solution. The result is the kind of mix-andmatch
software selection that has driven executives of “enterprise”
software firms up the wall and resulted in considerable consolidation.
Cobb Energy will implement the following line-up of asset management
software:
Lawson Software will handle financials and human resources/
payroll.
A new Cordaptix CIS from SPL WorldGroup, San Francisco, will
be installed for customer care and billing.
A component of Worksuite, of Houston, will provide the frontend
for Cobb Energy’s existing field automation system.
Intelliplant, a product of Information Intellect, of Marietta,
Ga., will handle fixed asset management accounting for
power and distribution assets.
“An EMC, like any distribution company, is pretty asset intensive, with
most of the assets being in transmission and distribution,” says Paolucci,
explaining why there is a separate accounting system for fixed assets.
“Most generic accounting systems have one asset number for something
such as a pole. Thus, they have to treat all those assets individually. To
avoid that, there are some specialty software systems that handle these
things as groups. Information Intellect
has one of those.”
Cobb Energy now is installing
and integrating all of the software.
“We’ve been through three conversions
so far,” Paolucci says. “We
decided to try to learn from our
previous mistakes — one of those
was to run the projects ourselves.
That’s why we hired Capstone. We
wanted a company that had some
expertise in managing a project for
us so we could stay sort of on the
outside and be more concerned
with learning the software and
training.”
Despite the assistance, the
installation is progressing in
stages and won’t be fully
completed until sometime in 2007,
Paolucci says. When it is, Cobb
Energy/EMC will join a long list
of utilities that entrusts asset
management to a collection of
best-of-breed software from
several companies.
definitions
The following are offered
as a guide.
ERP – Enterprise Resource
Planning
ERP systems developed originally
in heavy industry and tended
to emphasize financials and
resource planning, though they
gradually grew to include work
management, human resources,
and other “softer” disciplines,
including even customer information
systems (CIS).
EAM – Enterprise Asset
Management
EAM systems developed in more
process-oriented industries with
more emphasis on human resources
and work management, but
gradually grew to include financials
and supply chain management/resource
planning and CIS.
SCM – Supply Chain
Management
SCM grew up in plants and
factories and still concentrates
primarily on the movement of
parts, fuel, and other supplies
within the heavy-industry supply
chain. However, some SCM systems
have grown to include other
elements of ERP and EAM.