CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
19 November 2004
Implementation Investments
NB Power Goes Live with IMPRESS Project Integration Application-Implementation of IMPRESS Project I.AppT Completed in Record Time to Integrate Primavera® Project Management Software with SAP® PLM Application
IMPRESS Software announced the completion of Project I.AppT implementation at NB Power . The integration enables streamlined data synchronization between Primavera and the SAP Plant Maintenance (PM) application.
Serving the province of New Brunswick, Canada, NB Power is the largest electric utility in Atlantic Canada. Following market deregulation which took effect October 1, 2004, NB Power was reorganized into a holding company with subsidiary operating companies. As a result, NB Power remains a publicly-owned utility with a corporate structure to meet the demands of the competitive market environment.
Producing electricity at fourteen hydro, coal, oil, orimulsion and diesel powered facilities, NB Power depends on regular plant maintenance to uphold the reliability of electricity supply to the province. Since plant maintenance often requires facility shutdown, timely completion of maintenance activities is critical in order to sustain sufficient level of production capacity.
"Any delay in a shutdown project can impact on our service. Using IMPRESS Project I.App to integrate Primavera and SAP will help us ensure that plant maintenance activities are on schedule and on budget," said Peter Ahearn, Plant Outage Manager for NB Power.
Project I.App integrates the business processes of project planning and enterprise resource planning (ERP) that would otherwise run independently of each other. Ensuring project data is consistent across all systems at all times, Project I.App eliminates the need for duplicate data entry and the risk of mismatched schedules and resources.
Project I.App is a pre-packaged, out-of-the-box Integration Application that links SAP- with major project scheduling and management products, such as Primavera, Microsoft Project, and TrackSoftware.NET. Accessible via a standard web interface, Project I.App includes a set-up wizard that is easy to use and administer and requires no programming knowledge. Project I.App was jointly developed by SAP and IMPRESS and is supported through SAP OSS.
"Given our tight outage schedule, it was critical that the integration between Primavera and SAP is not only robust, but can be implemented within the short window we have between outages, which is usually less than ten weeks," said Roger McNabb, NB Power's Chief Information Office. "This is where we benefited from the fact that IMPRESS has a packaged integration application, so we didn't have to start from scratch. The speed with which such complex process integration can be implemented with Project I.App is a clear advantage compared to the alternative of using any generic integration toolkit."
NB Power is one of numerous energy providers and distributors that have recently standardized on the IMPRESS Project I.App solution, such as Conectiv, Nebraska Public Power District, Ontario Public Generation, and PG&E.
"The upfront work we have invested in designing a pre-packaged, flexible integration application is paying off when we see how quickly Project I.App is being put to work in the most complex project environments," said Omri Dotan, EVP Corporate Development and Strategy for IMPRESS Software. "We offer a new approach to the painful and age-old challenge of application integration, and we are delighted to see more and more customers realizing the benefits of our solution."
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