Case Studies: Comision Federal de Electricidad (CFE)

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CFE provides electricity for 19 million customers throughout Mexico. The state-owned company has about 150 power plants of various types, including steam, nuclear, and hydroelectric facilities, for a total of more than 35,800 MW of installed capacity. The Mexican Government established CFE to ensure that enough electrical energy was produced to meet the existing demand. The mission of CFE is:

	To assure, within an updated frame of competition and technologically, the service of electrical energy, in conditions of amount, quality, and price, with the suitable diversification of power plants.
	To optimize the use of its physical, commercial infrastructure, and of human resources.
	To provide an attention of excellence to our clients.
	To protect the atmosphere.
	To promote the development and to respect the values of the populations where the social electrification works are located.

The Problem

The CFE Laguna Verde Nuclear Energy Plant, located in Veracruz Mexico, faced impending sanctions by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to become compliant with initiatives to electronically manage vital plant documents. NRC requires that all nuclear plants maintain documents for the life of the plant plus 100 years. The storage of the massive amounts of documents that currently exist and that will be created in the future poses significant logistical problems for CFE.

The Solution

NAC has teamed with Identitech to provide CFE with a software product that offers robust and flexible document management, knowledge management, and workflow functionality. The FYI Software solution utilizes SQL 7.0 RDMS on a Windows NT 4.0 platform. During the development process, NAC worked with CFE to accurately depict their current workflow processes. As it is deemed necessary, the current processes are being revised to reflect the new workflow. All documents and drawings are currently being be scanned and indexed into the system to provide global search capability of existing documents to authorized users.

The Benefits

The benefits of the implementation of the FYI software are plentiful. They range from increased quality control to providing search functionality of database contents. The following benefits are obtainable as a result of the completion of this project:

	Improved efficiency and reliability of search and retrieval tasks
	11 years of plant drawings and documents available online within the CFE Intranet
	Uniformity of data
	Extensive audit tracking functionality
	Facilitation of current and future licensing issues
	Substantial decrease in effort and cost of long term document maintenance

The key factor to the successful implementation of the document management system is the support of upper management and buy-in by the end users. The challenge to essentially change the manner in which large institutions conduct their internal business processes is a tedious gradual progression under the best of circumstances. As CFE becomes more accustomed to the manner in which documents are handled internally, the functionality and flexibility to integrate with other legacy systems remains present. The FYI software has the capability to continually grow along with CFE over the upcoming years.