Reducing NC one call's false ticketing
Recommendations
In January 2000, NC One Call was called upon by its Board of Directors to find ways of
reducing the number of false tickets being submitted to its members. Metropolitan growth
in North Carolina was putting a strain on older systems, which in turn was causing
inefficiencies for its member utilities. The Director of NC One Call requested the input
from a number of major utilities such as PSNC Energy (a SCANA Corporation), Duke
Energy, Carolina Power and Light, BellSouth, Sprint and GIS consultants contracted the
respective member utilities, forming a committee to research what actions could be taken
to improve the system.
The major objective of this committee was to reduce the number of false tickets being
submitted, reduce the workload at NC One Call, and reduce the workload for the field
personnel of member utilities. A secondary objective of the committee was to reduce the
man-hours to prepare information for NC One Call on an annual basis. Finally, the third
objective was to increase the accuracy of the data being maintained at NC One Call.
It was agreed upon that the following objectives needed to be met:
- Change from a ¼ mile grid to a ¼ minute grid.
- Provide the option of reducing the grid from ¼ minute to 3 second gridlet (25 gridlets
per grid).
- Provide a way to use GIS to determine what grids need to be tagged.
- Implement an electronic tagging process to minimize human error.
- Allow a variable offset for each area to take advantage of a more accurate and
complete land base. (Since most members were relatively accurate to a landbase and
not positionally accurate to their facilities, long-term recommendations of each
member using a single landbase would be visited later.)
- Develop a mechanism to link tickets back to a GIS for field personnel.
Implementation
In year 2000, NC One Call implemented the Quickmaps/GS 2000 product.
This product reduced the grid size from ¼ mile grids, to ¼ minute grids, and 3 second
gridlets. By reducing the size of the grid, the number false tickets should be reduced by
65-70%.
As time approached for the receipt of member facilities by electronic means, NC One
Call requested that member utilities generate dynamically buffered polygons around their
underground facilities. The QuickMaps/GS 2000 system was flexible enough to handle
different buffers based on member's confidence in accuracy of their GIS facility data.
Concerns were raised by many members on the project team that the QuickMaps/GS
2000 software would not be able to handle polygons from each member and still be as
responsive as NC One Call needed it to be. After months of testing, NC One Call agreed
to accept linear segments only and tag their new gridlets based on the segments generated
by the members.
