AM/FM goes Mobile at Transalta

Project Methodology

1- Select a Viewer / Red-liner A~plication
TransAlta was determined to do as little development work as possible. Our corporate I.T. policy is “buy, don’t build”. We explored the market for an application that would have a suite of “out of the box” capabilities to meet our base-line requirements:

capable of displaying most of our corporate graphics files from their native format.
effective view controls, with configurable level displays.
easy translation of our AM/FM master data into the viewer environment.
ability to upload from viewer back to AM/FM model.
conformance with much of our existing AM/FM model practices and processes.

TransAlta evaluated several viewers, and chose Intergraph’s FieldViewTM application as our corporate standard.

2- Load the Entire AM/FM Model into the Viewer Environment
TransAlta was determined to provide as much of the master AM/FM data to the field as possible. We expect that having ~ available facility, customer, and land records visible at the work site will be of high value to end users. This availability should reduce the effort previously spent on inter-personal fact-checking, transcription, translation, and time delays. It should also begin to build a sense of personal “ownership” of correct records in the minds of the field staff, since not only can they see errors immediately, but for the first time, they can input corrections to those records at source, using the condition and arrangement of the actual facilities as their guide.

TransAlta provides ~ master graphics and database records to the Mobile AM/FM user, along with full review capabilities of the feature attributes and graphics definitions. The field user has as much access to AM/FM model records as a FRAMME user in the office.

3- Enhance the Viewer Application To Suit Our Workflows
TransAlta’s main goal in enhancing the commercial viewer application was to eliminate or reduce the human effort of translating “dumb” redlines into intelligent AM/FM features. We set out to develop definitions for certain features, within the viewer application, that would be a subset of our main AM/FM model features. We chose several of the most-used AM/FM features, representing the most common new facilities, and then chose their most critical attributes as the ones to be dealt with by our field users, An example would be our transformer feature, which has over a dozen attributes in AM/FM. The Mobile AM/FM version of this feature was configured with just 4 crucial fields, but all of these redline fields will upload back to the AM/FM master. The crucial redline attributes are sufficient to drive the field-relationship automation (logic) in the master model, which will then auto-fill many of the other AM/FM master attribute fields, without requiring user intervention.