Las Vegas isn’t just a town where tourists come to win and lose fortunes. It is one of America’s fastest-growing cities.

In 1980, the population was 165,000 — it is now approaching 600,000. In an effort to keep up with that growth, city officials have aggressively updated computer systems and software that help deliver municipal services.

“Because the city of Las Vegas is growing so quickly, we can’t keep doing processes in a slow, old-fashioned way,” said Patricia Dues, Las Vegas’ enterprise program manager. “That’s one of the reasons we may move a little faster than other public- sector organizations when it comes to implementing service-oriented architecture.”

The city worked with Innowave Technology LLC of Irvine, Calif., in introducing Oracle BPEL Process Manager, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, to integrate various applications and business processes. The city had previously installed the Oracle E-Business Suite to improve financial and human resources management. The BPEL Process Manager was recently used to streamline business processes at the city’s Water Pollution Control Facility.

A major project included upgrading a computerized application that monitors all the plant’s equipment and city sewers. Computers and software at the monitoring sites — and the networks they run on — also were upgraded.

In addition, the water-testing lab and the section in charge of preventive maintenance and work orders needed new software.

The final piece of the project was integrating those systems and databases, Dues said. “Not only did we need to make sure that all those applications could talk to each other and share information, but they also had to integrate back to the city’s Oracle E-Business suite.”

Automated approach
To achieve that goal, city officials focused on SOA and Oracle’s Fusion Middleware. SOA is designed to make it easy to integrate systems via a common architecture.

In many cases, organizations use Oracle’s Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) to automate workflows, so besides the technology shift, there’s also a cultural impact, said Peter Doolan, Oracle Corp.’s vice president of sales consulting for the public sector.

The Environmental Protection Agency has water quality guidelines and rules Las Vegas must follow, so automating monitoring at the wastewater facility was one of the first things city officials did.

“Rather than have a person looking at a dial or a printout, why can’t we have a computer system constantly monitoring the information coming from the sensors?” Doolan asked. “If we begin to approach any sort of threshold, then [the system] kicks off an automated or human process immediately rather than having to wait until after the fact.”

The old method
The system gives more real-time command and control of certain key business processes.

Before using a SOA, the city’s information technology systems were connected the way organizations traditionally achieve connections, by programmers writing interfaces.

They would write the code, fix the data fields, set up tables and write an interface for each application. Then the interfaces would be tested repeatedly until they worked — often for years.

Having all the city’s systems tightly integrated is the key to keeping up with the around-the-clock workload at the water plant.

When workers need to order equipment, for example, they go to the inventory person and check out the parts. The new software monitors whether the plant is running low on specific parts, and if they are in short supply, the system automatically reorders them.

Rather than training everyone on Oracle purchasing requisitions, city officials do it all behind the scenes using BPEL.

“A trigger sends a requisition over to Oracle purchasing,” Dues said. “That requisition for the part is all completed electronically. It goes through the approval process that we set up with the city, and as soon as it gets ordered, a purchase order is sent out.”

When the item arrives, the plant’s software automatically notifies the accounting department through the Oracle system that the item was received, and when the vendor’s invoice arrives, it is automatically paid.

“They tried for about two years to manually write an interface to do this work, [but] between the vendor and the city’s application, we just couldn’t get it to work,” Dues said. “With BPEL, we did all this integration within 10 weeks.”

Those software systems are also tied to the city’s human resources data. With that information, the salary of the person who orders the equipment can be included in calculating the total cost of the work: the cost of material plus the cost of performing the work. That data is used to better manage the plant and ensure the most efficient possible use of resources.

Faster and simpler
Las Vegas officials are using the workflows developed at the water plant as templates to create new interfaces at other departments.

“There are a lot of transactions that are being carried through all this work,” Dues said. “We’re just using it right now to speed up our operations and simplify our programming area.”

Doug Beizer (dbeizer@1105govinfo.com) is a staff writer at Washington Technology.