Illinois Power Upgrades to MDSI's Advantex r7 for Managing Field Service Operations: Energy Delivery Company to Migrate to Advantex From MDSI's Early Generation RM Platform.

Business, Energy, High-Tech Editors

RICHMOND, British Columbia--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 24, 2002

MDSI Mobile Data Solutions Inc. (Nasdaq: MDSI) (TSX: MMD), the leading provider of mobile workforce management solutions, has entered an agreement to supply its Advantex r7 solution to Illinois Power.

Illinois Power is upgrading from MDSI's early generation RM (Resource Management) platform, a solution developed by a company that MDSI acquired in 1997. Illinois Power elected to upgrade to Advantex to take advantage of further improvements in customer service and operating efficiency that the enhanced functionality and flexibility of MDSI's latest generation Advantex solution offers.

Elaine Scott, a Senior Manager at Illinois Power, commented, "To continue to provide outstanding reliability and customer service, we need to upgrade the technology that supports our field service business processes. MDSI has enhanced Advantex with a modern, open architecture that is highly scalable to grow with our organization in the future, and highly configurable to adapt to our evolving work processes."

Advantex will help approximately 500 of Illinois Power's field service workers, dispatchers and supervisors throughout the state manage all of their work, including electric and gas service, electric outage, gas and electric compliance, and construction.

For Illinois Power, Advantex will intelligently schedule work orders and, using complex business rules, assign them to the best available mobile resource. It will dispatch work order details to Illinois Power's mobile workforce, who will use Advantex to process their work throughout the day, and send status updates and order completion information back to the office - all wirelessly, in real time. Thanks to integrated GPS (Global Positioning System) and mapping capabilities, dispatchers will be able to pinpoint the location of workers at any time, allowing, for example, for better response to time-sensitive orders that require the closest worker to respond. At Illinois Power, the solution will work with a Mobitex wireless network and with mobile devices from Itronix.

Advantex can be rapidly implemented and, thanks to published APIs, easily integrated to Illinois Power's Customer One customer information system, CADOPS outage management system from ABB, and work management information system from Logica. Advantex Compose, an advanced configuration tool set, will let Illinois Power modify Advantex "on-the-fly" to meet the company's changing needs.

About Illinois Power

Illinois Power, an energy delivery company based in Decatur, Ill., serves electricity and natural gas to more than 650,000 customers in a 15,000 square-mile territory across Illinois. Illinois Power is a subsidiary of Houston-based Dynegy Inc. (NYSE: DYN), which produces and delivers energy, including natural gas, power, natural gas liquids and coal through its owned and contractually controlled network of physical assets. Dynegy serves customers by aggregating production and supply and delivering value-added solutions to meet their energy needs.

About MDSI

MDSI Mobile Data Solutions Inc. (Nasdaq: MDSI; TSX: MMD) is the leading provider of mobile workforce management solutions. MDSI's suite of applications improves customer service and relationships, and reduces operating costs by empowering service companies to optimally manage their field resources. MDSI also provides all of the professional services necessary to help customers implement, maintain and take full advantage of its solutions. For more information, please visit www.mdsi-advantex.com.