COLUMBUS, Ohio – ARCOS LLC, the market leader for utility and critical infrastructure resource-management solutions, has signed an agreement to support the MultiSpeak ® technology specification, which municipal and co-operative utilities and participating vendors rely on to standardize the exchange of data between software systems that handle things like field work, outage management and distribution operations. ARCOS is now offering utility managers the MultiSpeak interface as part of its resource-management platform. The interface will help utility managers easily take data about a power outage from, for example, NISC’s Outage Management System (OMS), create a work order and assign that order to the closest available crew via ARCOS Mobile Workbench.
If, for instance, a hurricane damaged hundreds of meters, web services available through the MultiSpeak specification could carry XML-formatted data from the utility’s OMS and launch an automated callout for damage assessors via the ARCOS Damage Assessment solution. Once in the field, damage assessors using mobile devices and GIS could send data back to the utility via data packets that would in turn launch a callout for repair crews via the ARCOS Callout and Scheduling Suite.
“MultiSpeak links a utility’s enterprise software systems and eliminates duplication of data entry, and manual processes, to give managers one picture of what’s happening,” says Lisa Federico, vice president of Marketing & Product for ARCOS. “By supporting MultiSpeak, we’ve done the upfront work of building a connection between our platform and other software systems before our customers buy ARCOS’s solution.”
The benefit for utility customers is that ARCOS is delivering a pre-defined connection point between its resource-management software and the outage management systems, SCADA systems and work management systems commonly used by many cooperative and municipal utilities. By adopting the MultiSpeak specification, neither ARCOS nor a utility’s information technology team have to undertake a software services engagement or develop APIs.
“Without this integration, a utility would have to build its own interface between systems or just rely on manual, time-consuming tasks like phone calls, entering and rekeying data and watching minutes slip by that could be better used to restore service,” adds Federico. MultiSpeak is an initiative of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, or NRECA.
