Met­ro­pol­i­tan Util­i­ties District’s Ron Schell, EAM man­ag­er, and Lind­say Dreck­man, GIS man­ag­er, will share what they have learned from the very begin­ning of their GIS imple­men­ta­tion to their cur­rent tri­als and tribu­la­tions of inte­grat­ing SAP and GIS. They will also dis­cuss their deci­sions to have a bet­ter mobile GIS solu­tion to com­ple­ment their SAP mobile solu­tion, along with their cur­rent Open Text inte­gra­tion solu­tion and their con­tin­u­ing road map to bet­ter their SAP and GIS mobile applications. 

The for­mat for Thurs­day, July 16 at 10 a.m. CT will include: 

• Brief wel­come and kick­off from ASUG 

• Hot-top­ic dis­cus­sion led by ASUG mem­bers Ron Schell and Lind­say Dreck­man from Met­ro­pol­i­tan Util­i­ties District 

• The dis­cus­sion will focus on: 

• Tran­si­tion from paper to GIS (go-live) 

• GIS in the field and ser­vices to use 

• SAP Geo­graph­i­cal Enable­ment Frame­work and need­ing SAP and GIS to sync 

• GIS dis­con­nect­ed and where to go in the future of integration 

• Shar­ing of recent wins or suc­cess­es, along with resources utilized 

Gain vis­i­bil­i­ty into the chal­lenges and suc­cess­es oth­er SAP cus­tomers are expe­ri­enc­ing, and acquire new ideas for real-world solutions. 

If you are expe­ri­enc­ing chal­lenges and would like to lead your own case study, fill out the sur­vey here. 

Think Tank Insights:

• Biggest rea­son to go from paper to GIS was for the abil­i­ty for the field per­son­al to make deci­sions in a time­ly and accu­rate man­ner. Make bet­ter deci­sions, they can then talk to the cus­tomer and talk through adjust­ments, make work orders, etc. live and the per­son­nel do not have to get into con­tact with a supe­ri­or to talk through requests and ques­tions. This process took a cou­ple of years but made a huge difference. 

• In their GIS, they cou­ple with SAP so that they know the equip­ment data (i.e. oper­at­ing pro­to­col, last ser­vice to machin­ery, etc.) 
• On an iPad their field reps have every­thing they need to process their job. It stream­lined every­thing in a mobil­i­ty mindset. 

• When you use GOE and GIS on SAP, when you start doing Data Migra­tion, it real­ly makes you clean your data, and if not, it real­ly shows you where your data is bad. IF you do not have good data going into this tran­si­tion it bring it to the fore­front and high­lights it for you. Bad data = messy data for the most part. This is a major les­son learned and data cleans­ing is some­thing you can do to help proac­tive­ly plan for a tran­si­tion like this. 
• Les­son Learned: Make sure your roadmap is flex­i­ble because you will have to make adjust­ments, you may have to spread some mon­ey else­where, but by hav­ing it flex­i­ble you are allow­ing your­self the abil­i­ty to make changes and be able to piv­ot while stay­ing on track with your main or orig­i­nal project. Flex­i­bil­i­ty is very impor­tant when planning! 

• Aman­da, ASUG: Upcom­ing Think Tanks and Offer­ings from ASUG 

• Util­i­ties Series — July 31 Mid­west Cen­tral Chap­ter will host 
• Util­i­ties Series — Aug. 17 LES 
• EAM influ­ence coun­cil will begin in the Fall as well 

• Ron, Met­ro­pol­i­tan Util­i­ties Dis­trict: A poten­tial road­block that came up with the iPads was actu­al­ly around larg­er peo­ple with hands that don’t allow for easy usage of the iPad inter­face, invest­ing in styl­ists or using voice com­mands has actu­al­ly been a very worth­while invest­ment. As fun­ny as this sounds, this is an impor­tant item to think about.