Major East Coast Utility Upgrades Critical Asset Management System
with TRM’s ScreenBuilder
Baltimore Gas and Electric Improves Maintenance Management

Its strategy is to remain a premier utility service provider in Maryland, and its track record is impressive. For more than 180 years, Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) has been meeting the energy needs of Central Maryland – today serving more than 1.1 million business and residential electric customers and more than 600,000 natural gas customers.

Typical Central Maryland energy consumers know that BGE provides the pipes and wires that bring them safe, reliable, economical and nonstop energy. And as a recognized leader in energy delivery, BGE understandably has little tolerance for outages and lengthy repair times. BGE leaders address these challenges by building in safeguards for uninterrupted service and planned preventive maintenance. They do it efficiently and cost effectively with the help of Total Resource Management, Inc. and the systems created with Maximo® enterprise asset management software y MRO Software.

BGE has relied on MAXIMO for substation maintenance management since 1996. The company later implemented a custom application component for outage scheduling. In BGE’s view, scheduling maintenance proactively – rather than waiting for problems to crop up – simply makes good business sense.

As part of BGE’s “Achieving Operational Excellence” initiative – a multi-year commitment to continuous improvement – the company needed to craft an upgrade plan for its Maximo software using internal resources and input from users. The ultimate goal was to standardize processes and application configuration across the BGE enterprise. “From experience during upgrades to earlier versions of Maximo, we knew the application was flexible and could support the linking of applications and configuration of screens, value lists and fields,” says Brian Jacoby, BGE project manager, Maintenance Management Systems. “While we were excited about using Maximo 5 with its J2EE architecture, we knew we had our work cut out for us.”

BGE needed a solution that would allow its team to quickly create, modify and finalize various screen configurations in a way that worked for the entire enterprise. Already satisfied with TRM’s successful approach to providing solutions, BGE chose TRM’s ScreenBuilder. “It was TRM’s ScreenBuilder, used in conjunction with Maximo 5, that brought this critical software upgrade and maintenance management project in on target and on schedule,” Jacoby says.

The critical advantage that ScreenBuilder offers is the ability to configure and preview changes visually on screen instead of writing Java code. Jacoby explains: “Our outage scheduling application alone required as many as 15 screens, all of which had up to 60 fields on each screen and a number of subscreens. If we had to write Java for all of this, it would have significantly impacted the cost and schedule of the project.

With ScreenBuilder, we were able to quickly move or remove grids, rename fields, select Maximo business objects, assign attributes and otherwise change screens depending on the criteria determined by our users. We were able to build out our Maximo 5 application with intuitive, user-friendly screens. In all, we not only finished the project on schedule, but within budget as well.”

In less than four months, the Maximo application was installed and configured for the substation implementation. Jacoby attributes this, in part, to TRM’s ScreenBuilder. “The TRM consultants were very helpful,” Jacoby says. “I am confident that if we didn’t use ScreenBuilder, we wouldn’t have met our project deadlines and targets.”

TRM’s ScreenBuilder is a browser-based graphical screen editor that enables users to interactively build and modify Maximo 5 application screens without JSP programming. Easy to use and featuring “drag and drop” functionality, ScreenBuilder lets users perform rapid prototyping and testing. Features include browser- based editing and tree-based navigation of Maximo Java server pages; easy editing of grid and page element properties; and both quick and live preview modes. Maximo 5 is the most advanced enterprise asset management software in the marketplace because its architecture leverages the latest concepts and technologies, ensuring optimum compatibility with today’s Internet infrastructure.

BGE expects to increase its use of Maximo 5 and ScreenBuilder. In 2004, BGE plans to expand maintenance management into gas and electric distribution. The company also hopes to implement additional processes for business areas such as regulatory reporting requirements, equipment analysis, mobile dispatch and maintenance, reliability studies and more.

“The response BGE received – the dedication and commitment from TRM employees – is admirable,” Jacoby says. “Based on this project, I would say that TRM is committed to its clients. I would definitely recommend and work with TRM in the future.”

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