INDUSTRY

ESRI, the world's leading developer of geographic information system (GIS) software, announces that Statnett, Norway's government-owned national electrical transmission system operator, is implementing a GIS system based on ESRI's ArcGIS platform. Arve Indrehus, who is in charge of new technological investments at Statnett, indicates that ESRI and Geodata, ESRI's distribution in Norway, were selected because of their high-quality products and excellent customer references. The implementation plan calls for the integration of GIS with IFS, Statnett's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The integration will be facilitated by Asea Brown Boveri Ltd.'s (ABB) Industrial IT 800xA system. The user will easily move from GIS to ERP and will be able to use spatial data and a variety of IFS forms, such as Active Work Orders, Equipment Data, Fault Reports, Connected Documents, and so forth, to streamline the data management process. Statnett believes that the investment in ABB's Industrial IT is an important step to future integration between their Control Center systems and ArcGIS. Statnett signed a contract for this comprehensive system and services with Geodata AS. The company will also implement a GIS module for forest management, in particular predicting forest growth, using ESRI's ArcGIS Spatial Analyst. An ArcPad solution for control and fault recording in the field will also be used. Other products in the installation include ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server as well as GEODATA WEBklient, which is based on ArcIMS and SOSI, a program for counting Norwegian map formats, both from GEODATA.