Building an Enterprise GIS by Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book, April 1, 2003 Early on, utilities, with no specific cartographic expertise and lacking any standards around scale, orientation, map sheet size, symbology, or detail, created a huge investment in paper maps and records. Whole organizational and operational processes were linked to maps and map grids. That legacy largely remains today. Today’s modern geographic information system (GIS) and its associated spatial database can offer radical improvements over the legacy paper map processes and thinking. Or the GIS can be compromised to look, feel, and behave like an automated map machine, retaining the old limitations, processes, organizational structures, and systems that preceded its implementation. This paper will describe the evolution of GIS and associated processes at utilities. It will also provide some examples of how leading utilities have shed and shredded their legacy processes to produce real business value with an enterprise GIS. Progress is often defined as improving upon past accomplishments. A breakthrough is defined as breaking away from past accomplishments. Progress is gradual; breakthroughs are quantum leaps. Breakthroughs require new knowledge, seeing things in a different way, and visualizing a new paradigm. Progress solves the problem of “How can I make this process work better?” A breakthrough revolutionizes the business. There is nothing wrong with progress. All businesses must improve their current operations, gradually tweaking processes, building new tools and facilities. Occasionally, new technology arrives that has the potential to significantly alter how a business operates. GIS is one of those technologies. The challenge for utilities is first to recognize that GIS can enable breakthrough improvement, and second, to shed the legacy that inhibits breakthrough in favor of just progress. Why is it so tough to shed legacy processes and thinking? The answer is that the legacy processes work so well and are so entrenched into the business that no one can even see that they are obsolete. Henry Ford was the pioneer of mass-produced vehicles. Mass production was a breakthrough from custom-built production methods. His processes and methods were emulated throughout the world. As part of the Ford process, large inventories of spare parts were kept, and large inventories of completed automobiles were manufactured awaiting customer orders. This worked for many years. Ford’s process was improved upon by more sophisticated manufacturing techniques, including robotics and computers. Toyota questioned Ford’s manufacturing process in a fundamental way by employing Demming’s statistical process control for quality and lean methods for minimizing inventory. The Toyota Production System (TPS) broke from the past to manufacture automobiles that were cheaper to produce with a quantum leap in quality. Toyota’s breakthrough implementation of TPS resulted in nothing short of market dominance. Evolution of Mapping Systems Maps have been used in utilities for many years. They needed to be. Workers needed to find their way to customers, underground structures, poles, and equipment. The maps served three main functions: • Documentation for what had been built — a “visual facilities inventory” • Basis for engineering upgrades and new customer connections • Representation of the network for analysis of electric or gas flow Often the responsibility for the creation and maintenance of the maps was with the engineering department. The engineers and technicians created new work orders. After the new facilities were built, drafters would copy the work-order data along with field notes and built changes back on to the maps. Map sheets were sent to the field offices and trouble centers. Copies of the maps were marked up by field people and sent back to the mapping group for inclusion on the maps. In the beginning someone within each utility made a decision to create maps. At that time they decided how big they should be and what should be captured on the maps. Utilities often would hire mapping contractors to draw the maps or simply copy maps from published map books, such as Thomas Bros. or from USGS quads or wherever maps could be found. As systems became more complex, new maps were created to show greater levels of detail. Over time, mapping became a big deal, with large staffs maintaining an ever-increasing number of map products with varying degrees of detail and annotation. Some maps were very accurate, others more schematic-based. Most were developed with no particular mapping standards, since all maps were used internally. Symbols, scales, and levels of detail were largely invented by the utility. Utility mapping groups organized their paper maps by grids. Sometimes they aligned with standard map grids, like the state plane coordinate systems, and other times they were just arbitrary. However, once the map gridding system became established, many other processes began using the map grid as a means of organizing work. Electrical and gas equipment, pole numbers, value numbers, even meter reading routes were often adopted or derived from the legacy map gridding system. These map grids found their way into early plant accounting, meter inventory, billing, trouble call, and customer systems of the late 1960s and 1970s. Operating divisional structures were often divided up along map grid lines. While the facilities paper maps were used extensively for engineering and operations, they were largely ignored in other major business units within the utility, probably because they were hard to understand and contained highly technical information. They were, in effect, engineering documents. The value of the information contained on these maps and records was largely hidden from the rest of the business. The Wonder Years End Investor-owned utilities enjoyed steady growth and prosperity, with little significant regulatory interference from the 1930s breakup of the utility holding companies (with the passage of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1938) until the 1965 Northeast Blackout. The blackout, the 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1973 oil embargo, the Clean Water Act of 1977, Three Mile Island, the 1978 Natural Gas Policy Act, the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) of 1978, the Energy Policy Act of 1992, FERC Order 636, FERC Order 888, and others caused huge investments in plant and equipment that did not generate one additional kilowatt-hour or Btu of additional demand for electric and gas utilities. In order to preserve shareholder earnings, rates needed to rise. However, with the breakup of AT&T, the rise in consumerism, and the post-Watergate negativity with large institutions, rate increases were hardly popular. State public utility commission and the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission could only approve rate increases. By the late 1970s, it was clear that utilities needed to cut costs to maintain decent shareholder return. By then, information technology could be applied to help improve productivity and customer service. The classic utility IT systems were created at this time: customer information systems (CIS), trouble call, meter inventory, work order tracking, payroll, supply chain, and financial. They helped drive down costs. All aspects of the utility processes needed to be improved. Visionaries saw that the information trapped on the hand-created maps and records might have additional benefit throughout the enterprise to help decision-making and improve performance and communication. Mapping Systems Evolve Computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) were becoming affordable. By the early 1980s, PC CAD/CAM systems were adapted to engineering drafting by utilities. CAD systems quickly replaced the manual drafting board for new design work. CAD was a natural for designing new substations, take-stations, and buildings. The time to create a new drawing was cut in half, revisions took seconds not hours, the quality was better, and the ability to print and electronically communicate was spectacular. CAD was great for new drawings. It automated the drawing process. Since it was important to have access to data about facilities, CAD systems were modified to allow facility data to be isolated and associated with the graphical representation. Thus the term automated mapping/facility management (AM/FM) was adopted. These modified CAD systems allowed some degree of storing and reporting of facility attributes in a database, while still maintaining the mapping functionality. While some AM/FM systems attempted to piece together the individual map files to form continuous maps, fundamentally they were managing drawings and associated data. The paradigm was essentially the same as the old mapping systems. Maps are drawings. They have a size, a scale, and symbology. During the same time as AM/FM systems were being deployed, GIS technology was maturing. GIS, like CAD and AM/FM systems, produced maps, but did so in an entirely different way. CAD and AM/FM automate the drawing and data capture process to create maps. GIS manages spatial information about things, places, and features in a database and displays the results in the form of the map. CAD and AM/FM replicate known information — a sketch becomes a finished product, whereas GIS creates new information. A word processor creates a finished typed page from a hand-written document (no new information). A database query solves a problem (a query creates new information). CAD and AM/FM systems created drawings from sketches (providing no new information). A GIS solves a spatial problem and creates new insight and information. Progress is automating the mapping function (using a CAD system). A breakthrough is uncovering the cause of a recurring reliability problem (using spatial analysis of a GIS). Whether the asset maps are stored on paper or in CAD files, visionary utilities have shredded the map sheets and viewed the facility data to solve broad-based business problems, not just engineering or network analysis problems. (See Larger Image) Figure 1: CenterPoint Energy – Know Where Your Assets Are and Are Not GIS — Adding Value GIS is about three things, and we’ll take a closer look at each one: • Decision-making • Enterprise communication • Efficiency Decision-Making Electric and gas distribution utilities have assets geographically dispersed throughout the service territory. The infrastructure is aging. It is simply too expensive to replace equipment just because it’s getting older. The key is to understand which assets need to be replaced and when. Replacing equipment too early means money could have been spent in other, more critical areas. Replacing too late means replacing after the equipment has failed, leaving customers without gas or electricity. GIS allows disparate information to be integrated. CenterPoint Energy of Houston, one of the largest electric and gas distributors in the nation, uses GIS extensively for managing its assets. Certainly, CenterPoint uses the GIS to produce facility maps. However, it uses the data underneath the maps to help manage its assets. Knowing where equipment is so managers can make intelligent decisions about planning and operational issues is critical. During 1998-1999, the CenterPoint Energy Underground Locating Division recognized a rapid increase in requests to locate underground facilities. That growth, along with the acquisition of a gas company and more facilities to be located, gave CenterPoint the opportunity to identify economies of scale in its underground locating business process. The result of that effort was Underground Locating and Ticket Research Application (ULTRA), a system that integrated GIS, new technologies, and process re-engineering to save CenterPoint Energy $1 million in its first year of implementation. Savings were achieved by using GIS tools and data to produce digital maps and processes that resulted in fewer “field locate” queries being required and increased efficiencies in the locates that were performed. Decision-making using GIS can be applied to these utility tasks: • Economic development — Encouraging development near existing underutilized gas mains and power lines. • Demographic studies — Sub-regional load forecasting, enhancing in-house data with external data sources such as land-use inventories, zoning data, and wetland protection areas. • Vegetation management — Linking reliability data to vegetation growth characteristics, as well as providing analysis to support just-in-time tree trimming or weed abatement. • System planning — Determining patterns in load growth. • Rate case studies — determining the cost of service. • Long-term capital planning — Linking historic weather, environmental, political, and social data to form long-term capital spending programs. • Reliability centered maintenance — Linking reliability to maintenance planning and inspection data. • Loss evaluation — Seeing where losses are higher or lower. Enterprise Communication When things go wrong, or when disasters strike, utilities need to communicate to customers, employees, the media, local government, and often state and federal emergency management agencies. The ability to communicate the current state of work or outages or crew deployments is critical. A variety of utilities use GIS to display in real time the current status of outages and the extent of the damage. In customer satisfaction surveys, customers consistently either praise or criticize utilities for their ability to communicate the current state of progress of outage repair, in-progress work for new construction, or for something as simple as repairing a street light. People generally understand that things can go wrong. The utility can be heroic in its efforts to restore power, but if it is unable to communicate progress to customers, then its efforts go largely unnoticed. GIS is used extensively in communication: • Work order status — Coordination of work internally and externally with other agencies • Weather and how it relates to current work in progress • Safety — Notification of where crews are in relation to switching operations • Crew and vehicle tracking • Communication of work division performance • Outage reporting to media • Bad debt analysis Efficiency Given the demands on today’s modern utilities, incremental improvements are not sufficient. Breakthroughs are required. Returns on investments (ROI) must be large; paybacks must be short. Aside from fuel purchases (whether through purchased power contracts or internal generation), electric and gas distribution utilities largest expenses are: • Labor — internal or contract • Materials and hardware • Carrying costs • Fleet Utilization of Labor Southern California Gas, a Sempra company, uses GIS capabilities for its Automated Meter-reading Information and Geographic Optimization System (AMIGO). The project provides a meter-reading realignment and optimization system in order to plan and dispatch routes for meter-reading staff. The system interfaces with Southern California Gas’ Customer Information System (CIS) and the data from the handheld field-meter-reading units. AMIGO is used to visualize the complex relation between Segments and Sections (local areas and combination of street blocks) for planning purposes. Furthermore, it allows the user to automatically create new, balanced routes using street-level routing optimization routines. AMIGO’s spatial database will store not only routes and employee information but also a read history for SoCalGas’ more than 5 million customer locations totaling in more than 60 million records. Additionally, meter-reading supervisors can remotely access the routes on a map display and move route segments between employees in case of employee unavailability. The system also allows SoCalGas to clean up inconsistencies between the street data addresses and the current CIS address information and make the improved data available to other departments in the organization. SoCalGas leverages geospatial processing for other logistical challenges, like the routing of customer service personnel. This project is called Advanced Resourcing Tool (ART). ART interfaces the dispatching system PACER, allowing dispatcher personnel to identify route assignments and exceptions visually. Routes are built for approximately 2,500 field technicians on a daily basis. Other areas where GIS has been applied for efficiencies are: • Engineering and design (using spatial optimization to minimize costs) • Operational planning/switching analysis • Permitting and notification • Work scheduling • Crew scheduling • Crew coordination • Fault location • Productivity measurement by location • Meter reading and service • Automatic meter reading deployment • Bad debt collections Summary The challenge for utilities implementing true enterprise GIS is to fully understand that a GIS is not an automation of the former mapping business process (an application) but a foundation for many business processes, many of them new. The justification for the GIS is not in the improvement of the mapping process, but as one of the enablers for fundamental and perhaps radical process improvement and its associated savings in cycle time, asset utilization, and productivity. GIS is a breakthrough technology. Utilities can fully leverage the data and its relationship to other information stored internally or outside the enterprise to better make decisions, facilitate broad internal and external communication, and improve work processes, increasing total shareholder return. n Filed under: White Papers Tagged under: Utilities About the Author Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book Chris Trayhorn is the Chairman of the Performance Marketing Industry Blue Ribbon Panel and the CEO of mThink.com, a leading online and content marketing agency. He has founded four successful marketing companies in London and San Francisco in the last 15 years, and is currently the founder and publisher of Revenue+Performance magazine, the magazine of the performance marketing industry since 2002.