quote:Originally posted by cottonjim: I'm in no hurry here, no offense folks, I need more time to reap the benifit of my other positions so I can load up on CNES. I am all for sending meter readers to the unemployment office.
So are you saying you find it easier to deal with your conscience disliking 1 meter reader rather than the big bunch of them?
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charts lookin' good. RSI is strong and right where it should be......just need some money flow and this will jump. I think we move up tomorrow IMO - anyone else?
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Contract rumors are on the ****s...Maybe anticipating a PR before the MR...These rumors have been floating for over a month now...both contract and partner rumors...Wish I knew hahahahah?????
quote:Originally posted by Robbie English: contract anyday now...in my dreams... but we know its coming. I am holding all 4 million shares long go CNES
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I think we all know Lighthipe is the guy to make it happen for CNES...his past contacts can make this door swing wide open. It's all in who you know - that will get you light years further than the competition.
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it's definitely getting rid of the weak of heart * 11 - I only see 2 sells in that group though. somebody is buying up all those shares.
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quote:Originally posted by gatorhistory: it's definitely getting rid of the weak of heart * 11 - I only see 2 sells in that group though. somebody is buying up all those shares.
A song comes to mind by The Red Hot Chili Peppers:
Give it away, Give it away, Give it away now, Give it away, Give it away, Give it away now....
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LOL! yes, I agree DK...I refuse to give away any of my shares to MM scare tactics. I've seen that the bashers are out on other boards...we shall see what happens
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Here is a good article that proves CNES is on the right track on getting their MDMS up as a priority. It is long.
Meter Data Management System - What, Why, When, and How 8.29.05 Hahn Tram, Executive Consultant, Enspiria Solutions Chris Ash, System Engineer, Enspiria Solutions
What? MDMS provides a single repository for processing and managing meter and meter operations data as well as meter read data. In an AMI enabled utility business, the volume, frequency, resolution, and type of data (e.g., interval demand data, voltage, outage events, meter tempering indications, etc.) received from the utility meters are vastly different from manual meter reads and mobile (drive-by) meter reading systems. To complicate the problem further, the utility may have selected multiple AMI technologies, such as phone-based system for C&I customers, a fixed network based system for urban/suburban residential areas, and Power Line Carrier based system for rural areas. With the investments in AMI, it is also reasonable to expect that the public utility commission, the customer, and the utility’s own management would request more load data analysis and reports, and greater rate and billing flexibilities. So, the customer care and billing applications and other business and operational systems will need to process more meter data from multiple sources. As a result, the utility often needs to make major enhancements to existing meter reading, customer information, and billing systems to handle the volume of data, to input from multiple meter reading sources, and to provide more advanced analytics for the load data.
Furthermore, with AMI it becomes more critical for the utility to maintain the meter asset data timely and accurately. (There would not be a meter reader to discover meter data errors.) The meter asset data, including meters and communication modules, needs to track the asset from acquisition to inventory to field installation and provide accurate the meter-to-customer and meter to network connectivity information. This often requires the utility to consolidate and enhance existing meter applications, including those in meter test, inventory, AM/FM/GIS and customer information systems for example. These challenges come at the same time as the utility is managing the deployment of the AMI itself.
MDMS helps the utility meet all these challenges of processing and managing meter and meter operations data as well as meter read data. MDMS provides a single repository for this data with a variety of analysis capabilities to facilitate the integration with other utility information systems such as the following:
The Customer Information System for customer care and billing, Outage Management System (OMS) to improve reliability, Enterprise Resource Planning for accounting and asset management, Mobile Workforce Management (MWM) to manage customer and meter work orders, Geographic Information System to provide good reliable load data for distribution planning and engineering, Transformer Load Management to provide accurate and timely data for optimizing transformer loading and change-out programs. Why? MDMS is key to AMI enterprise benefits while reducing the ongoing operation and support costs of IT.
Besides being key to achieving the enterprise benefits of AMI for the reasons outlined above, MDMS also reduces the ongoing operation and support costs of IT by streamlining and consolidating the many data systems that contain meter and meter read data that plague many a utility today.
MDMS Business Case Example
A mid-size multi-service utility in the Southeastern U.S., that primarily used their AMI technologies to supply consumption data to their CIS for billing, were looking for proactive ways to realize greater benefits from their AMI investments. Through implementation of an integrated MDMS, some of benefits they are now seeing include:
With quicker and more accurate response to customer bill inquires via CSR access to the MDMS repository, costs of billing research are being reduced by 25% (equivalent to 200 investigation jobs per month at approximately $60 per job). With off-cycle reads being supplied through the MDMS, 95% of field service orders for special reads have been eliminated with each being estimated at $9 per trip. With MDMS analysis of potential electrical theft, a 30% improvement in theft detection and recovery is being realized. Trouble call handling costs are being reduced by 25% due to the increased probability that the utility already knows about the outage when the customer calls, due to the call centers access to MDMS data. Other strategic and soft benefits the utility is realizing include improved service reliability with customer minute interruption being reduced by 8 to 15% and with distribution and transformer outages being reduced from 8 to 10%. In addition, customer satisfaction is being improved with faster outage information feedback to customers and non-intrusive customer callbacks through the AMI infrastructure for outage verification. When? The earlier you incorporate an MDMS into your AMI/Metering Strategy, the better your bottom line will be.
Conceptually, the meter module hardware, communications infrastructure, AMI head-end system, the MDMS, and the integrations with a utility’s existing back-office systems should be thought of as one end-to-end integrated and seamless solution that, only together, can enable the utility to achieve the expected benefits of AMI. Hence, it's beneficial for a utility to assess the capabilities it requires of an MDMS and determine how the AMI data will touch the utility’s existing systems, at the same time when evaluating AMI technologies and developing an AMI business case.
MDMS is best considered in conjunction with the AMI assessment and business case development, and implemented early in the AMI project. Besides being an enabler of AMI business benefits in operations, MDMS provides key functions that support the installation activities, for example:
Route planning generates an installation forecast considering resources, existing billing windows and materials. Materials forecasting generates materials requirements for the installation and initiates purchasing. Exception management tracks product problems and installation failures, creating reports and tracking corrective actions. The consolidated meter data synchronized facilitates asset management, including plant accounting. If you have deployed AMI technologies and don't have an MDMS yet, all is not lost!
Many utilities have fully or partially deployed AMI solutions without the use of MDMS. The reasons could be that the AMI deployments pre-dated the MDMS concept or product, or that the AMI business case was predominantly justified by avoided meter reading costs. It is probable that custom work has already been implemented to supply billing reads to the billing system and perform the necessary synchronization between the AMI and billing system, and that some point-to-point integrations have been implemented with OMS for example. These utilities should explore the business case of introducing an integrated MDMS – While AMI investments including the meter retrofit/replacement and the AMI communication network typically have a payback approaching 10 years, the MDMS and MDMS integration with existing AMI systems often have a payback of well under 3 years.
MDMS will likely enhance the AMI and IT benefits as explained earlier. In addition, MDMS will be able to leverage the advances AMI vendors have made in the flexibility and more real-time capability of their systems for integrating with other information systems. For example, rather than legacy FTP file-based interfaces, many AMI vendors are moving towards more modern real-time integration techniques like web services or industry standard messaging or queuing technology. Making use of these new integration techniques are keys to enabling such functionality as on-demand and synchronously 'pinging' the meter for billing inquiries, move-out requests, and outage/restoration verifications. Additionally, message based integration with the AMI head-end systems reduces the amount of high-end hardware needed to process the AMI data as meter reads are continually delivered rather than in batches that require processing within a small discrete daily window.
How? More than a database, MDMS must provide a convenient gateway for user access to the data and for interfacing with other utility information systems.
Incorporating MDMS into the picture during the planning and design phase of an AMI project ensures that all potential benefits of the AMI technology are achievable. It elevates the level of confidence in the business case by providing the utility an understanding of how the AMI data will be processed and integrated into the back office to realize the anticipated benefits. For example:
To improve customer service and response time for billing inquiries, MDMS needs to provide the customer service representative a view into the meter read history of the customer in an efficient and user-friendly manner and upon user demand initiate, process, route, and return the current consumption or demand data of the customer. Improving outage management requires AMI to have the communications capabilities and infrastructure that can provide the outage related data in a timely fashion, including outage notifications, on-demand outage verifications, restoration notifications, and on-demand restoration verifications. This also implies that the back office integration with the utility’s OMS is capable of supporting the near real-time 2-way integration with AMI. Enabling this integration is the role of the MDMS, as is such functionality as throttling outage notifications from the AMI to a level that the OMS can handle, proactively 'pinging' bellwether meters to provide the OMS with up-to-date outage status data, and processing on-demand mater status requests from OMS to the correct AMI data collection system. To realize the benefits of revenue protection, including meter tempering and illegitimate consumption requires AMI to be capable of providing the data required to detect theft, which also means that MDMS should be able to ingest and analyze the AMI data to initiate, track and close-out follow-up work orders via the utility’s work order management and Mobile Workforce Management (MWM) system. MDMS is not a commodity yet; the utility’s AMI business case and IT strategy must drive the MDMS product selection.
A multitude of vendors exist that fulfill the functionality expected of an MDMS. Some are from new companies in the field (most likely staffed with old hands from the industry) built from the ground up with the singular vision of filling this evolving MDMS product niche. Others are from established AMI companies who are (a) adapting and extending their existing meter management software to be a more fully featured MDMS, or (b) pre-integrating with other software systems to offer a hybrid solution to provide the MDMS functionality.
Each offering has functional strengths, weakness and gaps. For example, the solution may have some deficiencies in some necessary asset management functionality, it may lack the ability to support the deployment of an AMI with route planning and materials forecasting functionality, or it does not support real-time integration for more efficient on-demand meter reads. If a utility has completed an assessment and quantification of benefits in the AMI/MDMS business case, the business case will drive the identification and weighting of what functionality the future MDMS must support. A simple example being, if a utility has already fully deployed an AMI yet requires an MDMS to help fully realize the benefits of the AMI, then the MDMS solution does not need to include any functionality used to support an AMI deployment.
We cannot emphasize enough that the solutions in this space cannot yet be treated like commodities. Each product has its own distinct functional strengths and weakness. Each product has its own unique architecture differentiators, like the ability to perform and scale as needed. Each product is implemented with differing technologies that the utility IT department has to select one that it is comfortable supporting and integrating with. In addition, each company is unique in its level of product development maturity and implementation experience and expertise. All should be considered to find the solution that best fits the utility’s needs.
Should you just extend the capabilities of your existing meter read management system?
Many utilities already have a repository, typically home-grown, of meter read data used as an intermediary between the existing manual or drive-by meter reading system and the billing system. In conjunction with one North American utility that was considering an end-to-end integrated AMI/MDMS solution, an assessment was performed of the effort to extend its existing intermediary meter read repository into a more fully featured MDMS. After an initial sense that “it shouldn't be too hard” (this being a red-flag in itself), the diligent evaluation and estimation indicated that building an MDMS was not going to be a trivial achievement. Using Lines of Code (LOC) as a measure of system complexity, extending the existing system into one of MDMS-like functionality was in the 100,000 to 200,000 LOC range. Anecdotal software development metrics indicate that this is a multi-year development effort with the required software development resources numbering in the double digits. Not a trivial undertaking by most definitions, even if the rest of the utility has the time and patience waiting for the development to occur and the software to become stable.
However, if your utility IT department has a proven track record of software implementation projects and the cost to internally implement an MDMS is comparable to buying an external packaged solution, then other common "buy versus build" risks and issues need to evaluated and added to the equation. For example, the ongoing need for utility resources with the appropriate skills and knowledge to maintain the system during its life expectancy is a risk with associated cost that should be considered.
Conclusion
For those considering the deployment of AMI technologies, you already know it is not going to be cheap and it is not going to be easy. During the evaluation of AMI technologies and building of the AMI business case, the inclusion of an MDMS solution into the scope of your efforts will be well worth the time. It will assist you in the deployment project and in the realization of benefits after deployment. For those who have already taken the leap into the world of AMI, the addition of an MDMS will help you get the full benefits from your existing AMI investments. MDMS is not a commodity yet, it is prudent that the utility select the right MDMS solution with careful planning, using its AMI business case and IT standards as drivers.
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RC...respectfully, everyone here knows your opinion...it does, however, makes your agenda clear when you tell ppl things like this and your posts from the other day. I'm surprised you didn't pump MGEN in that post of yours as well.
Most people here use charts as indicators - as I do - but they are only that - indicators. For you to say without hesitation, this won't move until May is absurd. Charts do NOT work as crystal balls...you cannot make such a claim with any firm accuracy. It is a guess and an opinion based on indicators - of which you should make clear for newbies on this board.
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quote:Originally posted by gatorhistory: RC...respectfully, everyone here knows your opinion...it does, however, makes your agenda clear when you tell ppl things like this and your posts from the other day. I'm surprised you didn't pump MGEN in that post of yours as well.
Most people here use charts as indicators - as I do - but they are only that - indicators. For you to say without hesitation, this won't move until May is absurd. Charts do NOT work as crystal balls...you cannot make such a claim with any firm accuracy. It is a guess and an opinion based on indicators - of which you should make clear for newbies on this board.
Well put!! RC...did your charts work for DVFN? NO... Please..state your opinions as just that..Opinions...not as fact...
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Unless someone provides a reference from a reputable source I always take it as an opinion. Charts don't count as reputable sources as people can make them with whatever variables they want and like so many have said they only help indicate trends they don't tell the future.
quote:Unless someone provides a reference from a reputable source I always take it as an opinion. Charts don't count as reputable sources as people can make them with whatever variables they want and like so many have said they only help indicate trends they don't tell the future.
Exactly Wino, I just want to make sure newbies realize that.
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Have been looking at CNES weekly chart at stockcharts.com and taking note of prominent cup and handle formation. Once we rise to top of handle another run should be in order IMO exact timeline unknown. I was also analyzing CMF last night and after a substantial correction it is clear money flow is increasing. Greater money flow = greater buying demand--and should translate to higher PPS. Prior tight ranges (before handle) showed new round of accumulation so dynamics here appear to be very positive for hopefully next leg up--
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