We’re excited to have Doug Payauys, VP of Information Systems/CIO of Consolidated Electric Cooperative, guest post on his company’s highly successful ArcFM™ installation.

Consolidated Electric Cooperative (CEC) is located just north of Columbus, Ohio and touches an eight county area.  

Along with serving our 16,000 electric members, we own and maintain the Enlite Fiber Optic Network that has grown extremely quickly since its inception in 2010. 

It was built to serve our internal data and voice network needs, the scope of which includes SCADA, advanced metering infrastructure, security, and remote monitoring. 

In 2012, we started delivering services from carriers to end customers utilizing roughly 200 miles of the Metro Carrier Ethernet and an open access dark fiber network. 

By late 2014, approximately 100 additional miles of fiber optic network were added to support our growing demand for high speed transport and Internet bandwidth. 

With our growing infrastructure, capturing as-built network engineering and mapping to manage existing and growing networks was an increasing challenge. CEC recognized that it needed to deploy a software system that captures existing network GIS and fiber splicing information, so that no one person held this critical business data. 

We searched for options that would allow us to deploy an out-of-the-box fiber management solution that could also be used to manage our electric and natural gas systems.  Schneider Electric’s ArcFM™ software suite was identified as the best solution for CEC’s needs.  It contains not only Fiber Manager™, it also contains tools to manage and design the other networks. 

SSP Innovations (a trusted partner of Schneider Electric) was introduced to CEC at Schneider Link User Conference.  It became clear to us that rapid deployment of ArcFM™ could be achieved cost-effectively by SSP Innovations. 

Through a combination of remote and onsite configuration and user/administration training, the TEAM (CEC and SSP) deployed the base system within a few months and solved challenges unique to CEC. 

SSP did an outstanding job of adapting the implementation to Consolidated’s needs.  Because of SSP’s experience with Schneider and knowledge of their software and support, configuration issues were quickly resolved.  User training challenges (many created by Consolidated) were attended to very quickly by the SSP team.  
 
Now implemented, ArcFM Fiber Manager™ allows CEC to document our fiber assets and gain significant insight into the fiber network. 

We intend to expand its use by focusing heavily on Wavepoint.  Utilizing the web software enables us to rapidly access GIS fiber information and splicing details in the field. 

Wavepoint has already proven to be a great system when we recently had a mouse chew through a section of fiber cable.  An OTDR was used to determine the distance to the fiber damage.  The Wavepoint software enabled CEC’s outside plant personnel to quickly determine where the mouse chew (pictured below) occurred, and we promptly dispatched crews to fix the damage.  

We continue to highly recommend SSP’s suite of services to other telecom partners and will continue to use their services to improve our GIS deployments.