Software Integration Specification to Give Co-ops Powerful Ways To Manage Outages, Information and Applications

A major new development from the MultiSpeak® Initiative will give co-ops opportunities to harness data from their existing software applications in powerful ways and use this knowledge to improve reliability and service to consumers. The MultiSpeak Initiative has released a new specification that enables up to nine applications to exchange key information in real-time. The new MultiSpeak specification, dubbed MultiSpeak 2, now covers:

• Automated meter reading
• Outage management
• SCADA
• Load management
• Customer information systems
• Geographic information systems
• Engineering analysis
• Interactive voice response
• Staking

“Competitive pressures require co-ops to get more mileage from the data they collect. The release of MultiSpeak 2 is a groundbreaking achievement because it covers just about every system used by electric cooperatives, and it will give them timely access to data,” says Marty Gordon, senior program manager for NRECA’s Cooperative Research Network (CRN), which has sponsored the MultiSpeak Initiative from its inception.

The Initiative has garnered support from more than 120 software providers that serve the electric cooperative market. These companies, many of which devoted considerable time and resources to craft this historic specification, see many benefits in real-time systems integration.

“The important information for cooperatives to know is what’s going on with their systems right now. The only way to do that is through a real-time environment,” says Mike Bowdle, vice president for U.S. sales for Survalent Technology, a SCADA vendor (formerly known as Quindar Products Limited).

“In five years, co-ops and vendors will wonder how we ever did without integration standards,” says Wayne Carr, president of Milsoft Utility Solutions. “It’s like garage door openers. We used to do just fine without them, but we couldn’t live without them now.”

MultiSpeak 2 will enable co-ops to make better use of data captured by
AMR systems, for example. Experts predict that one of the most powerful partnerships will be integration of AMR and outage management systems. During an outage, data gathered by AMR can flesh out the specifics of an outage. Systems also could verify that service has been restored to all meters.

“We feel our participation in MultiSpeak provides great value for our
customers,” says Vicki Trees, marketing services manager for Hunt Technologies, an AMR vendor. “The value of the information our system collects only multiplies when integrated with other applications. From our perspective, it was a must-do.

”Cannon Technologies Marketing Director Doug Backer adds, “We believe the more you integrate, the more useful your IT investment is.

”And co-ops will need to wring all they can from their IT investments to meet the increased demand for service. “The only way to meet the challenge of increased regulatory and public demand is through technology,” Carr says.

Applications Talk by E-Mail

With MultiSpeak 2 interfaces, applications will send messages back and forth much like people send e-mails, according to Gary McNaughton, MultiSpeak project manager, who is vice president of Cornice Engineering, Pagosa Springs, Colo.

“When a bit of data changes in an application, such as a new customer address, the application sends out an e-mail to all of the applications that want to know that this information has changed,” he says. The previous MultiSpeak specification updated information in batches.
Batch communication is also supported and has been enhanced in MultiSpeak 2.

Real-Time: A Milestone

The move to real-time communication is an achievement co-ops have been waiting for. “Real-time communications is going to be extremely powerful,” says McNaughton. “It’s going to enable them to maintain their databases in synchronism without the need for a person to take an action,” says McNaughton. “It all will happen under the covers, so to speak.”

Stephanie Deal, computer system specialist for Central Electric Cooperative, Parker, Pa., says, “I’m excited that they want to go with real-time. A real-time specification that would allow the data to pass back and forth without any user intervention, that’s where we’d like to go.”

Previously if two vendors did not offer an interface between their products, co-ops usually faced equally unpalatable options: Manually maintain multiple databases or pay for custom programming, often at a cost of $10,000 to $20,000 per interface.

To help CRN member co-ops maintain affordable, reliable service, CRN launched the MultiSpeak Initiative in 1999. Today it continues as the only systems integration effort aimed at electric cooperatives.

Going to real-time is a “big leap” that will enable co-op employees to use the
systems they have to be more responsive to members, according to Bob Richardson, vice president of new business development for Distribution Control Systems Inc. (DCSI), an AMR vendor.

“They might be restoring power or analyzing the load on a transformer. By pulling together all the information made available from different applications, you end up with one ‘windshield’ that unifies all data the co-op knows.”

MultiSpeak interfaces are not designed to be plug and play, but Bowdle of Survalent Technology sees them as “alleviating a lot of the work that the co-op has to do, and the resources that they have to dedicate to get these products to talk to one another.”

“MultiSpeak Version 2.0 addresses the very important and difficult issue of integration between real-time functions, such as OMS and SCADA,” says Wayne Carr, president of Milsoft Utility Solutions.“ Such real-time integration is practically non-existent except for specific-vendor
efforts.”

Carr adds, “MultiSpeak is not a magic bullet.” MultiSpeak from the start has invoked an 80 percent rule. The Initiative endeavors to resolve 80 percent of a typical co-op’s integration needs, or as project manager McNaughton puts it, to “solve most of the problems for most of the co-ops.”

MultiSpeak, says Carr, is an “attractive contribution to the solution.” But he
adds that it will require the continued commitment from vendors to implement and maintain the spec. “It also requires the co-op to demand that the vendors they work with implement the spec.”

Fostering Partnerships

Ron Camp, CEO of Southeastern Data Cooperative, says that vendors must
build relationships with one another for MultiSpeak 2 to be a success. “What MultiSpeak does is start a framework for the building of relationships. That’s always been there, but MultiSpeak accentuates that. If vendors adopt MultiSpeak and work together, the value to the cooperatives would be very significant in terms of increasing productivity.

”Richardson says, “The ultimate benefit is that co-ops will be able to put together their ideal portfolio of technologies and vendors without the integration cost taking that choice away from them.”