Low Cost Applications for Leveraging your GIS Investment
This was not a perfect solution. Sometimes roads were assigned the wrong value and we had to manually make corrections. However, a few days of programming and testing resulted in named and annotated roads for our landbase. The new improved landbase provided much more valuable information for our users.
Finding Customer Location
Frequently, a big problem for our line crews when making a service call was determining a customer’s location. Often, the address information in our CIS was not adequate for dispatchers to direct crews to the correct location. This resulted in wasted time by our crews driving around trying to locate the customer. By providing GIS to our dispatchers and developing the "Customer Finder", we solved that problem. We used the same data model as illustrated above in the Landbase section to resolve the problem.
The Customer Finder provides several indicies to the customer table (name, name/city, meter number, phone number, etc.). The dispatcher enters the appropriate information, presses the Get button, and the result of the query is displayed. The dispatcher then can select the customer from the list, press the Goto or Pan button, and the GIS map will orient to the chosen customer’s demand point location. With the information on the resulting displayed map, the dispatcher can then direct the line crew to the correct destination. There are several other features of the Customer Finder:
- The Sort button allows the dispatcher to select a column and sort the query results by the results in that column.
- The Highlight button highlights (i.e., displays in red) the selected customer’s demand point in the map window.
- The Output button allows the dispatcher to either print the query results or save it to a file.
- Options under the Get button allow the dispatcher to query all the customer on a given line section or all customers within a given area.
