Keeping a city energised

One of the largest energy companies in Seoul, South Korea, urgently needed to replace its legacy communications control system with a 21st-century solution.

To call Seoul, South Korea, a megacity would be an understatement - it’s the world’s second largest metropolitan area, with a population of 25.6 million people. More than half of the country’s residents live in Seoul.

Those residents need a lot of energy, including natural gas. Samchully City Gas is a natural-gas distribution company that serves Seoul, supplying not only liquefied natural gas to residential and commercial customers, but also the gas that fuels the city’s steam supply and power-generation systems, fuel cells, cold- and warm-water supply systems, and even the city buses.

With 5000 employees and an annual revenue of approximately US$2.33 billion, the scope and complexity of Samchully’s operations reflect the scale of the city it serves. That’s why Samchully relies on a centralised communication system to coordinate, control and manage its operations.

Samchully recently installed Zetron’s DCS-5020 Digital Console System with the help of Seoul-based communications equipment provider Hanswell. The solution is providing Samchully with the updated technology and functionality it needs to manage its extensive operations.

Seoul, South Korea, has a population of 25.6 million people. Credit: Wikimedia/Leeyan Kym N. Fontano.

The need to update

Prior to 2012, Samchully was using remote desktop equipment for its operational communications. The equipment had been in use for many years, however, and was beginning to fall behind in its ability to meet the company’s evolving needs. In addition, communications technology had advanced considerably over those years.

Company officials began to realise that their operations could benefit greatly from the improved functionality and additional features an updated, more comprehensive communications solution would offer. This included capabilities that would allow them to combine multiple devices and resources into a single system and provide a graphical user interface to control them all.

The situation became more pressing when the need arose to use multiple iDEN devices on the system; the existing equipment could support only one such device.

Samchully began searching for a vendor to help it obtain, design and implement a new communications system based on current technology. After considering a number of proposals, they awarded the project to Hanswell.

Based in Seoul, Hanswell provides two-way radio equipment and RoIP, dispatch and intercom systems to public- and private-sector clients throughout South Korea and Asia.

Hanswell Vice President Sebastian Beck explains some of the most critical factors that contributed to the company being chosen for the project. “Not only have we had a long-standing, positive and successful business relationship with Samchully over the years,” says Beck, “but our proposal was based on Zetron’s DCS-5020 Digital Console System. The DCS-5020 would be able to provide the centralised, updated and improved functionality Samchully was looking for and would more than fulfil their requirements of the project.”

Zetron was chosen for other reasons as well. For the past seven years, Zetron’s Australasia office in Brisbane and its North Asian-based territory manager have worked together to support Hanswell’s business-development efforts throughout South Korea. Zetron has also responded to local market requirements by engineering its key dispatch products so they can easily be localised into the language of local users - in this case, Korean. This combination of easy localisation and local support has been a key ingredient of Zetron’s success throughout the non-English-speaking countries of Asia. And it contributed significantly to the decision to use Zetron equipment for the Samchully project.

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Samchully City Gas’s new control centre. Images courtesy Zetron.

Smooth operators

The solution for Samchully comprised three positions of Zetron’s DCS-5020, 10 iDEN ports, three PBX lines and 12 hotlines. The equipment was installed in Samchully’s command centre in a process that Beck says was completed smoothly and easily.

Once the new solution had been installed and thoroughly tested, Hanswell trained Samchully’s 12 operators on the best and most effective ways to use it for their purposes. The training and transition to the new system went more quickly than anyone had expected, thanks in part to the system’s intuitive operation.

“Because the DCS-5020 is so easy to learn and use,” says Beck, “the operators caught onto it readily. In fact, many of them found that, once they got used to the system, they were able to appreciate more and more the extent to which it simplified their tasks and helped them function more efficiently. That’s in large part due to the fact that the DCS-5020 allows them to control everything from the console. They’re able to attend to their command-and-control tasks and operations without having to focus on the equipment itself.”

Beck says that the customer is extremely pleased with its new equipment. “They particularly like the system’s high-quality audio and flexible, easy-to-use graphical user interface,” he says. “They also like its intuitive operation, web and closed-circuit TV integration, and its ability to integrate and connect radios and other communication lines and resources, such as PSTN phone lines, to their radios. Its support for Korean is also a real plus.”

Although the installation at Samchully’s command centre has been completed, this is not the end of the story for Hanswell.

“Thanks to the success of this project, and because the features of the DCS-5020 meet the requirements of the Korean National Emergency Management Agency [NEMA],” says Beck, “we are currently in the process of reviewing second and third projects that will also involve the DCS-5020.”