AED-SICAD User Community Met at the 4th European Utility Forum
Albeit financial crisis and tight travel budgets, more than 80 attendees visited the 4th European Utility Forum, which was celebrated this year in the heart of Europe – Brussels. A total of 18 different countries were present, in a good mix between customers, business partners and prospective customers. It proved again to be an excellent forum for everybody to meet their peer professionals and discuss project work, technological trends and simply to get to know each other better.
A key highlight of the conference was the user presentations of a number of different customers, ranging from smaller to very large utilities. The row of presentations was opened by the Belgium Utility PBE, where Raf Roosseels and Ghafoor Kangria presented their ongoing ArcFM UT project, focusing on the challenges which are presented by the documentation of the PBE Cable TV network. Thomas Kindervater from EWE, which is the 5th largest electricity supplier in Germany, gave a good overview on the introduction of ArcFM UT at EWE – a challenging undertaking with 80 editing users and more than 1800 other GIS users. Bill Meehan, Director of Utilities Solutions at ESRI Inc., widened the scope of how GIS can play a crucial role in utilities not only in documentation and analysis, but also in many other fields. During the second day, Miha Pregl from GISData was presenting the first introduction of ArcFM UT for Sewage outside of Germany, the city of Koper (close to Italy) in Slovenia. He was followed by a presentation from the GIS team of the Electricity Distribution Company from Belgrade (EDB), which was done jointly by Jelena Milosavljevic from EDB and Ljubisa Adzemovic from Livona, highlighting interesting details in their ArcFM UT project like 3D laser scanning of critical infra structure or automated import of GPS field measurements. The final customer presentation was done by Marnix van Welie, Project Manager of the ArcFM UT project at Brabant Water, one of the largest Water Utilities in the Netherlands. Special interest sparked his life demo of their ArcFM UT Mobile deployment which was demonstrated on tough books used by Brabant Water field staff.
AED-SICAD complemented the user experiences with product related presentations, ranging from news from the flagship of the ArcFM UT product suite, the ArcFM UT Editor, over extended demos on the ArcFM UT Mobile to new web-based editing applications based on the GIS Portal and ArcFM UT Web. The new ArcFM UT Asset Manager was well received and generated a lot of interest. The topic of integration – both with Network Calculation programs, and also online synchronization with other IT systems based on EAI tools, was again of principal focus. Gerald Kreuwel, product manager of the ArcFM UT product suite, closed the conference with a presentation on the planned developments. This year’s winner of the AED-SICAD Business Partner Award was the ESRI Distributor of Slovakia, the company ArcGEO, which was honored for their outstanding and competent work with the utility company VSE. During the social hours, as for example the dinner in the beautiful setting of a former bank, the conference attendees had plenty of time to get to know each other and discuss the best buys in excellent Belgian chocolates! Next year’s 5th European Utility Conference is already eagerly awaited, and speculations among attendees about the possible location ranged from Dubai over Ljbuljana to Berlin. We will keep you updated.
Florian Brandi-Dohrn
International Sales
florian.brandi-dohrn@aed-sicad.de
+49 89 45026 217