The Eskom mission statement reads:

* Vision: To provide the world's lowest cost electricity for growth and prosperity.

* Mission: To satisfy all our customers' electricity needs in the most cost-effective way.

* Strategy: To develop Eskom as a business that maximises the value of its products and services to South Africa.

Living up to these high ideals, however, is a continuous challenge and requires thought and effort throughout the corporate structure. Information technology obviously has an ongoing - and it could be argued, increasingly important - role to play. In this vein, Eskom's Information Technology Department (ITD) has implemented Bentley MicroStation as a standard throughout Eskom, ie throughout its Transmission, Generation and Distribution divisions. Installation and training on the MicroStation is undertaken by Intergraph Systems. Olivier says ITD is responsible for information contained in Eskom and is responsible for development, support and consultation in its IT-related systems, in all departments, nationwide.

MicroStation J, the very latest MicroStation product, establishes a new benchmark for engineering software in the form of enterprise engineering modelling, a feature that increases enterprise engineering productivity. Essentially, the engineering process is integrated with enterprise-wide IT applications such as financial, logistics and supply-chain management systems. Eskom has long realised that globally, companies are requiring an increasingly tighter integration of the design process into corporate IT structure in order to increase countrywide efficiency. By installing MicroStation, their users are now equipped with tight integration of business IT applications and discipline-specific engineering functionality.

Clarifying the aforementioned Eskom divisions as they relate to the electrical process, from source to light bulb, we begin with Generation. This division is responsible for generating the electricity at high voltage. It then supplies the electricity into the Transmission grid. Transmission forms the second broad phase by transporting the electricity through high-voltage power lines to an electrical substation. The third phase of the process, controlled by the Distribution division, begins when the electricity is converted back to a lower voltage and distributed via power lines to the end-user.

MicroStation is designed to focus on the entire lifecycle of products and assets from conception to construction, deployment and decommission. Purchasers of new licences of MicroStation are entitled to choose a licence for one of Bentley's five discipline-specific configurations available. These are geoengineering, building engineering, manufacturing industries, plant schematics and civil engineering. Danie Olivier and his staff at ITD provide the backbone for all the documentation and engineering systems within Eskom. They are responsible for different contracts throughout the country at different sites. Olivier says of MicroStation: "We use it in the design offices throughout Eskom. There are 500 MicroStation users spread out as groups throughout Generation, Transmission and Distribution. We use it for designing, planning and maintenance."

The scope of Eskom's MicroStation work encompasses such examples as the design of substations, survey planning, electrical drawing and architectural projects. When designing electrical substations, the designing gets done in about 40 different layers - complex work made a lot simpler by using MicroStation. It is also used in the GIS department for geographical electrical data purposes. On the environmental side, Eskom also uses MicroStation to plot power lines and study how they affect farm borders.

Clarifying MicroStation use throughout Generation, Transmission and Distribution, Olivier says that Generation has the smallest number of users. It is used, he says, at power station level and the design focuses on plant tests and inspections. In Transmission, he says, you are concerned with power lines and high voltage substations. Distribution has the largest number of MicroStation users, who are concerned with medium to low voltage electricity and the planning involved in fulfilling Eskom's quota on the electrification process in the rural areas.

While MicroStation is now a standard used throughout Eskom's CAD departments, the company has actually been using the Bentley product - or its predecessors - for the past 18 years, when a pilot site in the Transmission department began using the product then known as IGDS.

Danie Olivier says MicroStation was chosen because of the overall satisfaction levels that it provides. Eskom users, he adds, have constant ongoing training to stay up to date with the latest versions and technologies. The software also has the added benefit of being compatible with all other Windows products. In part because of their satisfaction with MicroStation across the board, Eskom's Distribution division has also recently acquired another Bentley product, again through Intergraph. Bentley's ProjectWise is being used for engineering document management and control - again to great satisfaction. Olivier says Distribution uses ProjectWise - known as 'Team Mate' within Eskom - to control the drawings and documents in an engineering environment. ProjectWise was introduced in August 1999 and roll-out is currently underway, with plans to have it completed in all eight distribution regions, in 400 seats, by the end of February 2000.

Olivier says of ProjectWise: "ITD undertook a comprehensive needs analysis and chose to implement ProjectWise, after a year of investigation and sourcing other possible systems, because of its total integration with the CAD standard. As they are from the same vendor and totally integrated, ProjectWise was the obvious choice."

ProjectWise offers key features such as:

* Document storage, protection and retrieval.

* A project and document navigation browser.

* Workflow management.

* Viewing and redlining.

* Unrivalled MicroStation integration.

* An application program interface for configuration and customisation.

Of the training and implementation, Olivier says that each installation has taken about a week per site, while doing the migration of existing systems also adds on about an extra week. There was no parallel running necessary and hence no disruptive impact, he adds. One of the major benefits of installing ProjectWise within Distribution is that where before Eskom employees were using a number of different internal Eskom systems, there is now an internal standard. Olivier says: "The use of ProjectWise has opened up a lot of information so that people now have more access to current information regarding projects." Total integration with MicroStation was another key benefit.

ProjectWise enables organisations to store, retrieve and control a variety of engineering documents, with support for over 200 file format types, such as MicroStation, AutoCAD and Microsoft Office files. Documents are stored in their native data format - in either a central archive or distributed across file servers. In addition to managing the storage and retrieval of documents, ProjectWise oversees the lifecycle of documents, controlling the creation, editing, review, release and archival of engineering designs and documents. It can generate, manage and track multiple versions of documents, and it also records their history - for example, being able to pinpoint when files were checked in and when version changes occurred. Olivier comments on the practical implications of this feature when he says: "For example, if you are building a new electrical substation, it means that country wide, the various disciplines in the project - for example planners, engineers, draughtsmen, maintenance people and surveyors - can all have access to the correct data."

Regarding security of information, access rights to an individual document depend not only on the document and the user, but also on the state of the document in the workflow (In Revision, Released, etc). These access rights prevent unauthorised use of documents and provide efficient, controlled access to documents throughout the organisation.

Intertech Systems was recently involved in a 60% joint venture with black empowerment telecommunications company the Ikwezi Group.

Intergraph Systems

(011) 313 1222

pthomson@intch.co.za