AED-SICAD European Utility Forum, 2011 Report

This year, the European Utility Forum started with a pre-seminar to give an introduction to the ArcFM UT product suite. This had been a request of the participants of past years and was very well received by ample attendance. Right afterwards, the already well established show of the ArcFM UT product highlights was celebrated in the prestigious setting of the room Président in the hotel Lutetia. Gerald Kreuwel, product manager of ArcFM UT, lead the audience in a 10-point countdown through the most remarkable product innovations of ArcFM UT V10. Especially the new object manager, new layer managing tools and the ArcFM UT Server generated high interest. But also new features from the Esri base, such as the ArcGIS Workflow Manager or greatly improved ArcGIS Schematics called for applause by the audience, giving utilities extended possibilities to use ArcFM UT. A central part of the European Utility Forum is of course also the presentation of customer projects to stimulate discussion and experience exchange between participants. The ArcFM UT introduction at the Ville de Luxembourg, Luxembourg, was presented by Hermann Brünemann, project lead at Siemens SIS. He gave a detailed account of the GIS project at this multi-utility project, focusing on the challenges that such a complex project brought with it. Peter Harabin from VSE (Slovak Republic) and Marian Marcincak from ArcGEO then presented the integrations of ArcFM UT to different IT systems in place at VSE: Integration to SAP PM, SAP IS-U, SAP FI-AA, SCADA, network calculation programs and other IT systems.Pierre Nouaille-Degorce from IGN France then introduced the participants to the impacts of INSPIRE to European Utilities, a future challenge but also a chance for standardization. Also highlighting the importance of system integration, Daan van Os from Brabant Water, Netherlands, gave a presentation on the different types of integration to the GIS in place at this large water utility. An important aspect is as usual here the synchronization of customer addresses avoiding redundancies and errors.Chrystelle Ourzik from Esri Inc. and Günter Dörffel from Synergis (Austria) then highlighted more the technology aspect with an in-depth presentation on the ArcGIS Server capabilities. This was followed right away with the presentation by Gerald Kreuwel on the native ArcGIS Server extension âArcFM UT Serverâ which exposes ArcFM UT data with the necessary functionality in a Silverlight or JavaScript client. During the morning of the second day, last yearâs concept of parallel tracks was preserved, giving the attendees the chance to either look more closely into expert technology issues or to dive even more into different subjects of system integration, where workflow management was also more closely discussed. Patrick Dolemieux from Esri Inc. and Gerald Kreuwel then brought forward the greatly improved new capabilities of ArcGIS Schematics, which makes creating e.g. orthogonal schema of your network quite easy. An important talk by now has become the presentation of Dr. Martin Ameskamp on system sizing and performance monitoring, passing on the experience of many large projects to the audience. Gerald Kreuwel then gave the last presentation, summarizing the road ahead for the ArcFM UT product suite.After the sunny and warm days in Paris, the participants of course were curious to learn which city will be selected for next yearâs event, and AED-SICAD will keep you surely informed on this!