Jo-Carroll Energy, a rural electric cooperative serving more than 26,000 customers in northwestern Illinois, recently went “live” as one of the Trimble Energy North America’s first production Trimble NIS and Trimble DMS deployments.
“Jo-Carroll Energy took the lead as one our first customers to migrate from Utility Center to Trimble NIS and DMS and are already seeing the advantages of the new system,” said Matti Syyrakki, business area director, Trimble Energy North America. “We knew they could benefit greatly by making the switch."
In fact they did. Jo-Carroll immediately liked the Trimble NIS field use capabilities, allowing them to still view and identify network data in the field. They also liked that they could manage the Trimble NIS system with a lot less administration or configuration. The IVR integration capability also allowed for easy connection into their customer information system making it easier to handle after hours or large volume of calls in the call center.
With Trimble DMS, Jo-Carroll found the network modeling capabilities very useful, as well as easy to configure and set-up for asset editing, staking and documentation of the network. In particular, the asset editing feature was easy to use.
“We really like the Trimble DMS network modeling capabilities,” said Dean Skinner, manager of engineering services at Jo-Carroll Energy. “It allows us to update the network model with real-world information from crew data to maintenance on substations and switching changes. As a result, we can mimic opening and closing switches a lot easier so that the network model truly reflects the latest network configuration.”
In Trimble DMS, Jo-Carroll also liked the ease of use of system and its more flexible and user friendly configuration. In fact, they are already excited about the things they’re doing in Trimble DMS that they couldn’t do before. In particular, the AMR integration into Trimble DMS was straightforward and supported their initiative to move to a smarter grid.
“The integration with AMR into Trimble DMS was pretty straightforward,” said Laura Simmons, mapping & data specialist at Jo-Carroll Energy. “This enabled us to capture unsolicited events from the AMR systems and automatically feed that information in DMS directly to the dispatcher in the form of a trouble ticket which generated a more proactive and timely response to a network issue.”
Most recently, Jo-Carroll also upgraded to the latest version of Trimble NIS and Trimble DMS. For Jo-Carroll DMS and outage management system users, the upgrade took only 1.5 hours. Remaining Trimble NIS system upgrades only took a total of four hours.
“We were pleased with how well the upgrade went with minimal downtime and impact on Jo-Carroll staff and users of the Trimble NIS and DMS systems,” said Jamey McCay, Worldwide Support Manager for Trimble Energy.
