Chris Brighouse presented in the afternoon on the EPFM roadmap. Attended with many in the utility industry. This will be a short post on some of the relevant ideas presented.
EPFM Platform
We posted last year on the EPFM solution. I mentioned back then I was surprised it was on Webtop – actually moving away as D2 version was announced. The solution evolved appears to have evolved from Europe. Asset Operations 1.0 Features included:
- Support of alternative taxonomy/view of information with faceted search enabling key search use cases.
- Pre-defined security models and roles
- Standardized change workflow and forms for SOPs, Standards ,Guidelines
- As-built document change process
- ISO standard document control compliance
- Rapid assembly of regulatory submissions
- Equipment register for integration to Material and Work Management Systems
- Transmittal delivery services
- Bulk load support
- Brava view/annotation integration
- Integrated Geo-locationservices
- Mobile client
Chris demoed the new release of this product based on D2.
The other offering is Captial Projects. Announced that the product will be on xCP 2.x.
Roadmap Announcements
- Asset Operations 1.0 – Q3 2013
- Capital Projects 1.8 (Webtop) – Q3 2013
- xChange Site on-premise – Q4 2013
- Asset Operations 1.1 – Q1 2014
- xChange Site SaaS – H1 2014 (believe that is first half of 2014)
- Capital Projects 2.0 – 2014
Summary
We weren’t sure what to think of the EPFM solution as we haven’t seen it deployed at any of our client. Utility clients that attended the presentation thought the same. It seems to have had some success in Europe and South America but, based on their was no partner accredited to deliver anywhere but Switzerland, Middle East and Romania.
Also, some concern among existing clients consistent with discussion yesterday in regards to migration being required from their existing Data Models. Let me know your thoughts below.
We had a pretty in-depth demo of EPFM here, but it really didn’t fit what we needed. Because it’s also on top of Webtop, there really isn’t a benefit. Our team in house has built something that is much more useful to us.
The hard part will be what do we do when we are forced to leave Webtop. Can the same things be done in D2? Or xCP?
I agree…while EPFM offers freedom from customization,it has certain limitations as well.Also EMC’s implementation partners appears to have lack of desired competency to deal with this tool
we are looking to deploy EPFM as a new Documentum customer, would we experience similar issues as we won’t have a WebTop instance to migrate from?
Michael,
I think it depends on your timing. As we mentioned in the blog Asset will be available in 3rd Quarter on D2. Other solutions like Capital Projects are going to be Webtop but we would think that they are changing with the 2.0 release to either be D2 or xCP.
Dave