An application view of integrating Geospatial technology for utilities
Keith E. McDaniel
Executive Director,
Strategic Planning - Utilities
10499 Bradford Road
Littleton, Colorado 80127
Introduction
Today's utility and communication companies participate in a global and dynamic marketplace.
Consistently faced with new markets, new competition, and increasing customer expectations,
utilities must focus on increasing customer service, providing reliable service, and maintaining or
lowering costs.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are proving valuable tools for achieving many of
these business objectives. ERP systems knit together the various parts of a company, enabling
executives to make better-informed decisions, reduce costs, and bolster productivity. The
business processes automated and integrated by an ERP system include finance, accounting,
human resources, work management, material management and many others. More and more
companies are replacing legacy systems with pre-integrated, vendor-provided solutions. These
solutions are becoming increasingly popular as corporate mergers and acquisitions result in
numerous incompatible systems within a single organization.
While an ERP system can address a utility's financial business process, it does not directly
support the engineering, operations, construction, dispatching, mobile computing, or maintenance
processes. These business processes deal with provisioning and sustaining the service delivery
network, and the applications fall into a unique environment of graphics, spatial data, and
complex relationships not found in the typical ERP alphanumeric environment. In this paper the
term Geospatial Resource Management (GRM) is used to designate the integrated suite of
applications (depicted below) that address these business processes, which automate the
provisioning and sustaining of the service delivery network. GRM applications include design
change management, dispatch, service analysis, outage analysis, mobile computing, trouble
reporting, operations and maintenance, enterprise viewing, access and update. These applications
are highly interdependent, rely upon geospatial data, and share a common geofacilities model.
Geospatial Resource Management
Component Overviews and Applications
An overview for each component is presented below with the applications for each listed to the
right of the component box.
The new construction request is initiated to expand or modify the service delivery system. These
requests can be as simple as adding a new service, or extremely complex construction for new
development or rerouting. Before deregulation, customers or developers within the service
territory of the prevailing utility usually initiated these requests. Under the new business rules,
marketing programs are now in place to pursue new development or competitor's customers
aggressively. These marketing programs are highly dependent on numerous geospatial models
such as facilities, demographics, environmental, and many more. Today's competitive
environment is a driving force for implementing geospatial applications.
