ATLANTA, June 19, 2003 (PRIMEZONE) -- CES International announced today that Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE) has gone live with CES' Centricity, a network management software system that allows for rapid response during power outages and streamlines a number of critical distribution operations functions.
Centricity enables BGE to automate a number of day-to-day operations functions, reducing response time and improving the restoration time during power outages. Centricity integrates a number of business systems for BGE, giving operators and executives an accurate real-time view of the entire electric distribution network.
Centricity automatically takes data from incoming customer calls regarding power outages and ties it to location data from BGE's GIS and SCADA systems, creating an integrated computer network model that provides real-time decision-making information.
"With the Centricity system, we are able to pinpoint where problems are on our network, which in turn helps us more effectively prioritize work and optimally dispatch our crews," said Ken DeFontes, BGE Vice President of Transmission and Distribution. "The system allows us to better serve our customers because we can provide them with accurate information about the length of time it will take to restore power, as well as providing timely feedback on the cause of the outage and the dispatch and crew assignment information."
For instance, using the analytical engine that Centricity contains, the Storm Management module calculates estimated restoration times, which are used to manage crew workloads, prioritize assignments and, in times of severe need, calculate crew resources when requesting mutual aid crews from neighboring utilities.
As part of the Centricity solution, BGE installed MyCentricity, which automatically alerts key company service personnel via network printer or e-mail to a pager, mobile phone or PDA when unplanned outages occur or when planned outages occur for service work and network upgrades. This helps BGE move to a proactive approach in contacting critical customers when outages BGE also deployed are planned or unplanned.
CommandCentricity, which contains Executive Dashboard, a decision support tool that provides supervisory and executive personnel distribution network status and event status information via Web browser over the corporate intranet.
"We are pleased with the success of this deployment of Centricity, which was a total team effort on the part of BGE and CES," remarked Ed Solar, Executive Vice President of Customer Operations for CES International. "As a result of integrating several critical systems, we expect BGE to see significant savings and provide a huge benefit in terms of increased customer service for the entire BGE service territory."
About BGE:
BGE is a member of Constellation Energy Group (NYSE:CEG). A Fortune 500 company based in Baltimore, Constellation Energy Group is the nation's leading competitive supplier of electricity to large commercial and industrial customers. We market energy nationally and manage the associated risks. We own and operate a diversified fleet of generation plants throughout the United States. We also deliver electricity and natural gas through the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company (BGE), our regulated utility in Central Maryland. In 2002, the combined revenues of our integrated energy company totaled $4.7 billion.
About CES International:
CES International supplies real-time software solutions to utilities on five continents, serving more than 35 million metered accounts. CES International is the developer of the Centricity operations resource management (ORM) system, which includes the market's leading outage-management system, and the newly developed Energy Delivery Management (EDM) suite of network-management software. For more information, visit www.ces.com or call 1-800-450-0266. CES International -- Redefining Connectivity.
Trademarks: CES International, its 'network-sweep' logo design, and Centricity are registered trademarks of CES International.