Networked Electronic and Manual QA of Conversion Data

Project Overview
UtiliCorp United is a Kansas City, MO-based company providing gas and electric utility services to 1.1 million customers in eight states (Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, and West Virginia), British Columbia, New Zealand and Australia. UtiliCorp is currently engaged in an aggressive conversion project, taking paper and electronic maps of holdings in the eight states to a common electronic format. This conversion is part of a larger reengineering effort, which moves the primary mapping fimctions from centralized drafting personnel to decentralized construction coordinators in field offices. Applications development for input of designed work is proceeding in parallel with data conversion. The resulting AM/FM/GIS of UtiliCorp is evolving as FAME (Facilities and Mapping Enabler).

Utilities under conversion are: Kansas Public Service, Michigan Gas Utilities, Missouri Public Service, Northern Minnesota Utilities, Peoples Natural Gas, West-Plains Energy and West Virginia Power. Map formats are diverse, from manual sources on paper, Mylar and linen to various electronic implementations of AutoCAD, CableCAD, Gentry, and ProScan. Age of maps ranges from Kansas Public Service linen maps dating back to 1906 to West-Plains Gentry maps being created from multiple sources just in time for the conversion. The historic mapping standards of the seven companies were predictably diverse, with an especially troublesome variety of information mapped and considered essential.

End users participated in data modeling sessions and other decision making meetings through the summer of 1997, during which common gas and electric data models were forged. The contract with a conversion vendor was signed in September, 1997, and we proceeded with gas and electric proof of concept conversion throughout the following winter. The production conversion schedule is aggressive, with all maps to be converted in 1½ years, resulting in a complete hardware, software, network and data rollout to 114 initial FAME end users by the end of 1999.