The electric utility industry continues to undergo significant and rapid change in all corners of the world and nearly all of these changes put pressures on electric utility companies to improve their business process to remain competitive. Everywhere you look, electric utilities are reorganizing to streamline their businesses to react more quickly, become more efficient, accomplish more with less, and generally operate more like a competitive business and less like a traditional, regulated utility.
Investments in information systems, if managed carefully, can provide significant relief from many of the pressures that electric utility companies are facing and the opportunity to grow their business. Some of the systems that have the highest potential for providing real performance gains for electric utilities are the ones that address issues and provide functionality for the operations activities within the company. Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Outage Management Systems (OMS), and Work Management Systems (WMS) are some of the systems that can have the largest impact.
There are many areas where GIS, OMS, and WMS can make a significant difference for an electric utility. From job design to outage visualization to vegetation management and National Weather Service updates, they hold the potential to streamline the utility’s business processes, meet regulatory requirements, improve customer service, and ultimately, be more profitable. Below are just some of the areas in which GIS can make a difference. I’ll start with one of the most important – job design.

Job DesignWhen an electric utility makes changes of any significance based on either a customer request, or some internal requirement, a graphic representation of the desired adjustments is almost always prepared. This graphic representation, along with the intelligent considerations of the designer or engineer on what should be done, can be considered the job design. The actual physical implementation of the job design by the field service work force generally represents what was intended by the job design, with the exception of minor field adjustments due to physical constraints (material unavailability, major rock in pole location, etc.)
When the job is complete, the information from the job design, along with notes on the minor field adjustments is used to update the corporate maps, records, and information systems.
The potential for significant efficiency and performance gains exist if the job design is performed within the digital environment of GIS. Assuming it is, the job design remains in a pre-posted (or proposed activity) state until the job is complete, and the field changes are applied. At that time the job can be moved or promoted to production, and the corporate maps and information systems reflect the most recent adjustments to the system. It all is done digitally, accurately, and quickly. And the best part is, in most cases this data can be made available for other activities in the company.
In utilities where this type of process has been successfully implemented, effort required by the mapping group after jobs are completed has been reduced to simply confirming the designer or engineer has followed the appropriate standards and graphic representations. Most GIS solutions can assist in the conformance to standards, etc. by automated checks and rules implementations while the job designer is preparing the job initially.

Job Engineering and Estimating
Job engineering and estimating is another critical area for electric utilities where GIS can make a significant difference. For example, as a job design is performed, the designer makes choices based on field considerations, material issues, etc. that will impact the material components and construction standards required. The opportunity exists for the GIS to improve the process and efficiencies from two separate perspectives at this point.
First, the GIS in conjunction with a utility design solution can include functionality to verify and validate the designers’ choices by performing engineering calculations from both an electrical nature as well as a physical nature. This type of validation can drive the designs to the minimum cost configurations which can add up to significant cost savings. This validation can also serve to assure conformance to safety standards and job workability implications.
Second, while the job is being designed, the designer is most likely making some type of listing of the construction standards and materials used. The GIS, within itself, or in conjunction with a work estimating solution, can include the ability to calculate a total cost for materials and labor associated with the particular job design, and even provide the ability for multiple designs for cost or other comparisons. If connection to the material management system exists at this point, the designer can even be cautioned when selecting materials that are currently not in stock.

Integration with Work Management
When a GIS is integrated with work management, there are many possibilities for using the power of the information sets working together. First, the work management system most likely has information pertaining to the job number, job title, accounting, location, etc. This information can be shared instead of re-entered if the systems are interfaced around a single data field key such as job number.
The GIS and work management can also be interfaced so that the progression of the job through many of the steps or status in the process, are automatically completed. For example, typical work management systems maintain the fact that a job is in the design stage (status = design). When the designer has completed the design in the GIS, the GIS can update the status of the job in the work management system to “approval”.
Typically, the next time the systems would interact would be through the “record as-built changes”, “final post”, or “completion” stages of the job. This type of integration between the systems can significantly improve the ability to understand where jobs are in the process and where the bottlenecks are in the process, with very little manual updating required by the end users.

Integration with Customer Information
Utilities need to have an understanding of the location of customers. This is helpful from the perspective of understanding the customer connection relative to the electrical facilities and network, as well as from the general organizational boundaries within the company.
Integration between GIS and CIS can be accomplished through direct connection by virtue of a database primary key that connects a service point in the GIS to one or more accounts in CIS. However, if the electric utility does not maintain the service point detail in the GIS, but instead stops at the transformer level, this connection can be made between the CIS and the transformer database. The connection of CIS to GIS is then achieved through the intermediate transformer database.
In either case, the goal is to understand and be able to communicate at the database level to outage management and engineering planning, what transformer, primary conductor, protective devices, and ultimately substation circuit breaker can affect an account in CIS.
Maintaining this type of information is critical to the proper operation of the outage management systems, and necessary for proper load calculations in the engineering and planning systems. By capturing this information in the GIS during the job design process, and sharing it with the other systems through interfaces at the database level, the electric utility can have a single point of entry solution. This can greatly reduce the cost of trying to maintain these relationships in multiple systems across multiple departments, and prevent attempts at trying to sort out which system has the most accurate and up-to-date representation.
Another benefit of interfacing GIS and CIS is the ability for maps or screen representations to be symbolized based on the most current information in CIS without manual intervention. For instance, symbols for medical or political critical customers can appear on the GIS and be managed automatically.

Integration with Outage Management
This interface is most likely the most significant benefit that can be achieved under the present regulatory or political operating environments for electric utilities in most areas of the world. Electric utilities are under significant pressure pertaining to the way interruptions of service are handled.
Outage management solutions, while non-trivial, can manage the receiving of calls (in conjunction with interactive voice response), provide tremendous assistance in pinpointing the expected problems, assist with the management of the multiple occurrences throughout the service territory, and maintain information for evaluation and historical analysis after the fact. However, outage management systems can only be effective if the model they operate from is correct and up-to-date. By depending on the GIS for the network model, the utility can have the single point of entry and maintenance of the network model. Since in the GIS the model is maintained during job design, and recognized as production data upon completion of the job, the GIS should have the most up-to-date network model of the circuitry when operating in its normal state.

Field Information
The workforce in the field has traditionally been provided paper maps for use in the field. However, those map sets are most often out of date, even though attempts have been made to provide updates. With GIS, the production of new copies of mapping data and information is much less cumbersome and more cost effective. For instance, CDs can be produced, copied, and distributed at a lower cost than large paper map sets. Alternatively, laptop PCs could be updated with map updates through docking stations. These methods of getting mapping data and information to the field assume the field representatives are outfitted with some type of hardware for viewing the digital data.
With the bandwidth improvements in wireless technology, as well as the increasing availability and decreasing cost, field service individuals will have the option of being connected to the corporate information systems in the future. Companies like Autodesk and others are making great strides in that technology. Once that becomes the norm, utilities will be able to capture even more savings from the available GIS data.

Web Based Connection
There is a geographic component involved in nearly everything that goes on at an electric utility. In the past, access to the geographic information was limited to a specified number of seats, or a particular type of training required to gain access. With access from any machine that has web browser capabilities, and much more intuitive browser type interfaces, essentially anyone in the organization with browser capabilities can tap into the information in the GIS, and take advantage of the investment in the data.
This phenomenon has a major impact on the potential for benefit from the GIS. Now any decision process a utility is involved in can easily be supported and improved by the geographic component. Utility workers have visualized in their minds or depended on mapping groups to gain that benefit in the past.
In addition, the web tools available can access data from the GIS, or virtually any other data source inside or outside the company. What this means is that data from different sources can be brought together to improve the understanding.
One example would be to show customers in various symbols based on electric load, together with existing substations to better understand the location of load centers and potential locations for new substations. Another is to show the location of jobs relative to the location of work crew home addresses for better utilization of the work force. Some additional examples will be covered later in this paper.

Outage Visualization
Outage visualization is an example of significant operational benefit that can be gained through the web-based access. One of the most difficult factors of managing a major interruption of service at an electric utility pertains to the distribution of information throughout the company for various purposes. Management needs information pertaining to location for purposes of crew management, outside assistance coordination, messaging to media, and various other issues. By providing a browser based view of the outage, the work force can get the up-to-date information it needs when it needs it without interrupting other individuals from the process of making restorations. This frees up more people to participate in the restoration process with minimal interruption.
Even if the outage management solution in use at the company has the information represented in the right way, the number of access points are generally limited or the additional individuals called upon to assist during a major occurrence do not have the training to operate the system.
Also, many utilities are using custom built solutions that only provide the outage information in a tabular format. Mixing the results of the tabular information together with the geography from the GIS can have a significant impact on improving the usability and understanding of the information. An electric utility could view the location of the circuit segment affected by an outage and could potentially add the location of the work crews if the trucks were equipped with GPS sensors and communication devices.

Vehicle Location Tracking
By outfitting the service vehicles with GPS and communication devices, the locations of service vehicles could be viewed on the GIS together with the utility facilities. This could provide valuable information for dispatchers and operations center individuals when determining what vehicles to assign jobs or service calls to, which can save potentially millions of dollars a year in the larger utilities. This information could help to reduce the amount of radio traffic at the utility.

The Sum of the Whole…
While implementation of a GIS system can be a significant undertaking for a utility, it is well worth the investment. If the foundation is laid carefully, the incremental additional investment for each new function builds upon the other returning exponentially more benefits. Like the saying goes, the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And as more and more utilities complete the initial process, the industry is just now beginning to recognize the endless possibilities and benefits that are available. As this happens, GIS will soon takes its place as one of the necessary components of the information system solutions for the utility industry. n
Douglas L. Laslo PE, GIS Solutions Division, Autodesk, Inc. E-Mail doug.laslo@autodesk.com
Web site www.autodesk.com/gis