Background
August 2002
Detroit Edison is an investor-owned electric utility serving 2.1 million customers in Southeastern Michigan and a principal operating subsidiary of DTE Energy, a Detroit-based diversified energy company involved in the development and management of energy-related businesses and services nationwide.
Detroit Edison's 7,600-square-mile service area includes 5 million people in an area stretching from the tip of Michigan's thumb to nearly the Ohio border. The Detroit metropolitan area is home to the nation's auto industry, steelmaking facilities and other key manufacturing facilities. Detroit Edison operates eight fossil generation power plants, a nuclear power plant and is co-owner of a hydroelectric facility.
Challenge
Detroit Edison's Fossil Generation group includes 320 roving skilled workers who, based on need, traverse the eight fossil generation plants - sometimes travelling 110 miles to respond to a call for assistance. A plant may unexpectedly lose the ability to generate power requiring a response team to mobilize quickly under pressure, or on any given day a plant may need a variety of maintenance tasks performed, necessitating mechanic fitters one day or welders the next. Additionally, these roving employees might work at a particular plant for four hours or up to six weeks depending on the situation.
Typically, when a team is called in, IT support would have to set up temporary hubs, routers, and cabling. Depending on the number of temporary workstations needed to be installed this could take up to two weeks.
The extremely dynamic work environment challenged Detroit Edison to devise a cost effective and time saving computing strategy that would enable their travelling workers to arrive at any one of the plants, effortlessly connect to the company's network and be working at full capacity as quickly as possible.
Solutions
Detroit Edison decided to implement a wireless mobility solution using DellTM Latitude C600TM laptops and Dell TrueMobileTM 1150 Wireless LAN Access Points and PC Cards. By outfitting their travelling workforce with Dell laptops and wireless PC cards, they believed that set-up times and costs would decrease significantly without creating additional technology complexity for their end-users.
Valuing the reliability and stability of Dell's client products, Detroit Edison had standardized on Dell OptiPlexTM desktops and Latitude laptops several years prior. After testing a variety of 802.11b Wi-Fi offerings Detroit Edison concluded that Dell's wireless solution would meet their security and performance needs. Detroit Edison rolled out a TrueMobile wireless LAN in one fossil generation plant in April of 2001 and is now expanding the system to include all of their remaining plants.
Results
Initially there was resistance from the workers about learning to use an unknown technology which might disrupt their ability to focus on the job, however, after one week end users were selling it to upper management with a commitment and fervor that was unbelievable, says Pence.
Due to these rave reviews management also wanted the ability to travel among plants and connect wirelessly in the main conference rooms. As a result, they too have experienced increased productivity and ease of mobility while in the field1 .
Prior to rollout, Detroit Edison was concerned about deploying wireless in an environment highly sensitive to radio transmissions. According to Pence this was not a problem. At the prototype plant we experienced no interference which was astounding and no noticeable degradation in performance when using 30 laptops per access point, he said.
While of course any company's actual savings will vary based on a number of factors, by providing their response teams with a wireless network solution as opposed to a wired network solution, Detroit Edison estimates their savings to be between $400 and $500 per employee. According to Wayne Hastings, Assistant to Vice President of Fossil Generation, By leveraging an existing infrastructure of laptops - this cost savings translates into lower electricity costs for Detroit Edison customers. It has also increased our ability to mobilize quickly, as we can now populate a plant with 30 additional bodies and 30 additional computers in about 15 minutes. It's a dramatic improvement.
In the future Detroit Edison will be evaluating wireless opportunities for other areas of the company, as well as Latitude's internal wireless mini-PCi Cards, which provide an integrated alternative to the external TrueMobile PC card. >As people have started using it - word has traveled fast, says Hastings, who adds They hear how easy and efficient it is, and they want it on their systems; usually, they want it as soon as yesterday.
1 Connect at a rate of 11Mbps up to 160m from connected access point. Range and speed may vary due to number of users, interference, transmission barriers (such as walls and building material) and other factors.
