Between the Poles

Estimating the economic and financial impact of poor data quality

I have blogged on numerous occasions about data quality issues relating to infrastructure data at utiltiies including geolocational accuracy, most recently here.  

There is an interesting compilation of statistics in an InsightSquared infographic relating to the cost  of poor data quality in general, not just for utilities.

• The cost of bad or dirty data exceeds $600 billion for US businesses annually.
• Poor data across businesses and the government costs the US economy $3.1 trillion a year.

But it's worthwhile remembering David Loshin's (The Practitioner's Guide to Data Quality Improvement) perspective about the statistics relating to data quality.  He cited some widely known statistics available in 2011

• Tom Redman’s 1998 article in Communications of the ACM said he was “aware of three proprietary studies that yielded estimates in the 8–12% of revenue range.”
• In 1999, Larry English suggested that “Based on numerous cost analyses, the typical organization may see from 15 to 25 percent of its revenue go to pay the costs of information scrap and rework.”
• In 2002, Tom Redman claimed that “Poor data quality costs the typical company up to twenty percent of revenue.”
• IN 2003, TDWI produced a report estimating that “that data quality problems cost U.S. businesses more than $600 billion a year.”
• More recently Larry English said “Poor information quality costs organizations 20-35% of operating revenue wasted in recovery from process failure and information scrap and rework.”

Loshin concluded that

1. There are few (if any) published papers on actual case studies providing tangible details about the cost of poor data quality.
2.  Academic notes and books base their numbers on estimates, “proprietary studies,” accumulations from survey responses, or extrapolation from other estimates of the “cost of quality.”
3. In the absence of tangible evidence of actual costs, according to the experts the costs seem to be rising, from a low of 8% of revenue in 1998 to 20-35% of operating revenue in 2009.  I'm not sure if that means that the cost of poor data quality is rising or that our understanding of the impact of poor data quality has expanded.

Some other interesting items in the InsightSquared infographic

• Data quality best practices boosts revenue by 66 %.
• If the median Fortune 1000 company were to increase the usability of its data by 10%, company revenue would be expected to increase by $2.02 billion.

SPAR 2013: Developing an intelligent 3D model of above and below ground infrastructure for the City of Las Vegas

At SPAR 2013 Keith Warren, BIM/3D SUE Manager at VTN Consulting gave a fascinating presentation on the 3D above and below ground model of city infrastructure including roads, utilities, telecom, and buildings that VTN has developed with the City of Las Vegas.  Keith believes that at the present time Las Vegas' 3D city infrastructure model is unique in North America.

This model also represents a classic example of the benefits of convergence, the integration of engineering design data including building information models (BIM), geospatial data including digital terrain models, high resolution photogrammetry, and point clouds derived from laser scanning, together with 3D visualization technology.

Education

About five years ago the City of Las Vegas approached VTN because they saw some potential value in 3D modeling.  At that time the city had had little experience with 3D modeling.  VTN has a broad range of in-house capabilities spannng engineering (traffic, public works, and 3D subsurface utility engineering), survey including laser scanning, GIS, building information modeling, and visualization.  Over the next two years VTN focused on education, working with the city and other utility agencies to introduce them to 3D modeling and visualization technology.  VTN organized workshops with the city, local utiltiies including the water district, and other public agencies to educate them in some of the capabilities of the new technology.  At the same time they worked with the city and other public agencies to understand the problems they were facing.

Challenge: subsurface utility engineering (SUE)

One of the problems that was identified repeatedly in these workshops, not only at the City but also at the utilities, was hitting underground infrastructure during excavations.  According to national statistics, in the United States an underground utility line is hit on average every 60 seconds.  The total cost to the national economy is estimated to be in the billions of dollars.  The problems is that in most municipalities in North America, for years underground utility lines have been put in the ground not according to plan but wherever it has been easiest and cheapest to build them.  In addition 2D as-builts of underground infrastructure are unreliable.  The result is that in most municipalities the location of underground utiltiies is very poorly known.  This was the situation in Las Vegas.

Since the city had been educated on 3D modeling technology by VTN, they decided that this technology could provide a solution for the problem of locating underground utilities.  The City decided to go ahead with a project to model one and half miles of Main Street in the older part of Las Vegas.  The project was intended to model below and above ground facilities including roadways, utilities and telecommunications, and buildings.

The project also specified implementation of a new low distortion geospatial coordinate system to make it possible to support engineering grade accuracy for geolocating infrastructure.

Reality capture

Buildings were modeled in several ways, including extruding a building footprint from a GIS, using building models from the Sketchup 3D Warehouse, laser scanning existing structures, and complete BIM models for newer buildings provided by architects. 

A variety of techniques were used for reality capture of underground utilities and other infrastucture includng GIS, survey, design records, test holes, and ground penetrating radar (GPR).  Above ground utilities were captured by combining GIS data with mobile laser scanning. 

In the future to improve data quality for underground infrastructure, since the City owns most of the right of ways within Las Vegas proper (some is owned by the Nevada DOT), it has mandated that in the future contractors are required to use open trenching for utiities and all work has to be surveyed before the trench is closed. 

Intelligent city infrastructure model

The deliverable was a set of 3D models of all the underground and aboveground infrastructure and buildings for the one and a half mile corridor of Main Street in old Las Vegas.   Engineering design and other data was combined with the City's geoimagery, digital terrain models and other GIS data. The models were designed to run with the software that Las Vegas already had including Civil 3D, Navisworks, ESRI ArcGIS and Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler (Infraworks).

Augmented reality

Working with a partner VTN developed an application for the iPad that allowed underground facilities to be viewed virtually under the actual roadway.

Map-21 and Every Day Counts

Map-21 and Every Day Counts are Federal Highway Authority (FHWA) initiatives that are designed to encourage the adoption of 3D modeling.  MAP-21 (Moving ahead for progress in the 21st Century) requires 3D modeling and virtual construction and visualization technology for all eligible projects.  The Federal government will provide matching funding on projects using intelligent 3D modeling and visualization of up to 5% fo project costs.  The Map-21 initiative was announced last July, but it turns out that what Las Vegas has done is in Keith's estimation 80-90% compliant with Map-21 guidelines.

Every Day Counts is another FHWA initiative that encourages 3D modeling.  According to the FHWA 3D modeling in transportation construction allows for faster, more accurate and more efficient planning and construction. The FHWA foresees that as the benefits are more widely recognized, many in the U.S. highway industry will transition to 3D modeling over the traditional two-dimensional (2D) design process.

Benefits of the intelligent 3D city infrastructure model

One of the major benefits that Las Vegas has experienced as a result of developing the intelligent 3D city infrastructure model is increased safety because of the reduced risk of unexpectedly hitting underground utilities especially hazardous ones like gas mains. 

The benefits of being able to accurately locate existing underground infrastructure are immense.  They include automated clash detection to identify potential problems when plannng, designing and constructing new undergound infrastructure.  Also there are reduced operating costs because of reduced truck rolls for cable/pipe locate operations. 

Overall the City has found that the 3D model approach provides more information per dollar invested, in other words more capabilities at lower cost.

SPAR 2013: Turning the construction process on its head

At SPAR 2013 I had the opportunity to hear a very forward looking presentation by Ron Singh, Chief of Surveys/Geometronics Manager at the Oregon Department of Transportation.  It was even more impressive because Ron's background is surveying.  His primary objective is speeding up the project development process.

Ron first looked at the project development process that has been used in the transportaion over the past 25 years.  It starts off with a complete survey of the project terrain to create a basemap - existing as-builts are rarely consulted.  Design of the new project is then conducted based on the basemap produced by the surveyors.  The result is paper drawings which are used by construction contractors to build the project.  After construction is complete construction as-builts are submitted, but they are almost an afterthought.  They are often as-designed rather than as-constructed, and most importantly they are not "sealed", meaning nobody signs off on them putting their professional reputation behind their accuracy and reliability.  Practically what this means is that in the transporation industry, as-builts are treated as unreliable information.

What Ron Singh is proposing is to stand this process on its head by making the post-construction survey the critical source of reliable asset information in the form of a 3D intelligent model. 

Then when a new project is initiated 80-90% of the necessary information is already available in the as-built database making a complete resurvey unnecessary.  All that is required before design can begin is minimal due diligence to validate the as-builts. 

It also implies that there is a reliable asset database that is maintained thoughout the operations and maintenance phase of the lifecycle.

A Lean approach to streamlining utility business processes

I have blogged on many occasions about pathological business processes for designing, building and operating and maintaining infrastructure that plague many utilities. Some of these processes don't seem to have changed since Edison and Tesla's time and result in redundant data, wasted effort, backlogs, and poor data quality.

At the EDIST 2013 Conference in Toronto, Ottawa Hydro described how they used a Lean Process to address this problem specifically in the capital execution (design and build) process.

Ottawa Hydro spends $90 million every year on capital projects and this is forecasted to increase, because of aging infrastructure and the transformation to the new smart grid.  But in this time of aging and shrinking workforces at utiities, they have found that while capital expenditures are going up, they have less staff to manage the process.  The result has been frustrated staff and delays in construction because designs are not getting completed in time, increasing spend on overtime, and most importantly a significant carryover of capital, and worst of all and unhappy regulator (the Ontario Energy Board).

The Lean Process involved convening a team of 10 grass roots people  from all divisions of the company who spent 5 days identifying the the current state and the issues associated with it.  66 issues were identified.   They took a break for 2 weeks and then got together for 5 days of brainstorming resulting in a set of recommendations to upper management.  They prioritized the recommendations based on their projected impact and size.  They moved first with simple processes involving one department with immediate payback.  After successfully completing a few of these, they moved on to more complex processes involving multiple departments.

The results speak for themselves.  Even though the capital budget has increased they are getting the work done and have reduced overtime by 35%.

Realizing the value of smart meters and AMI by integration with geospatial and other enterprise systems

In September 2011, I blogged about one of the most amazing applications of smart meters and AMI that I had come across.

Alabama Power had deployed about 1.4 million smart meters in its operating territory. One of the initiatives they have undertaken to take advantage of their smart meters was to integrate their automated meter infrastructure (AMI) system with their outage management system (OMS).  The smart meters give them immediate information about an outage, helping identify without sending a crew out whether it was a network or customer problem  The integrated AMI/OMS system helps in reducing unnecessary truck rolls.

Disaster management

But the smart meters and AMI also helped in another, perhaps from a business planning perspective, unforseen way.   In April 2011 thirty tornados hit Alabama Power's operating area completely destroying two substations, flattening transmission pylons, breaking 7500 poles, and leaving 400,000 cutomers without power. 

By looking for smart meters that could be read the day before and comparing them with the meters that could not be read after the tornados, Alabama Power was able to put together a detailed picture using Google Maps of where power has been lost - all without making telephone calls.  The application could also provide emergency response officials with infrmation about whether the power was on or off in specific buildings - critical information that first responders require before entering a damaged building.  In addition, Alabama Power was able to track power restoration trends as customers started coming back on-line.

Integration of AMI with geospatial and other enterprise systems

There is an interesting recent interview with Arshad Mansoor of EPRI, who makes the case that to gain the full advantage of smart grid-related systems such as AMI, geographic information systems (GIS), outage management systems (OMS), data analytics and workforce management systems, they must all be well integrated.  The Alabama Power case is a very good example of the benefits of integration of AMI and geospatial technology specificially.  Mansoor sees integrating AMI with a geographic information system (GIS) as the first step in integrating AMI with enterprise systems..

He says that one of the most important benefiys of inegrating AMI and geospatial technology is the ability to link the utility's service point and metered account with a customer's phyical address.  Mansoor says that getting 100 % of customers correctly linked without integrating AMI with GIS is almost impossible.  He estimates that most utilities maybe have 5 percent incorrectly linked.  This could be even as high as ten % in some cases.

Once you can link service points to customers physical addresses and geolocation, then a whole range of other systems can be integrated with the AMI and GIS, including the outage management system (OMS), data analytics and the work management system.  Together these will all contribute to reducing the restoration time after an outage.

For example, if the outage management system is integrated with the AMI and GIS, then an upstream trace from multiple failed service points to identify the common point of failure is feasible.  The reverse is also feasible, identifying customers to contact when a piece of equipment or a substation fails.

With the workforce management system also integrated with AMI, GIS and other sytems, it is possible to send the crews to the exact point of failure.  

But there is the data quality issue here, about which I have blogged about on multiple occasions especially relating to the quality of location information, which is a major challenge for many utilities.  Poor quality location information about outdoor faciltiies can leave crews struggling to find failed equipment, especially at night or in snow, and  can lead to severe delays in service restoration.

San Bruno explosion inquiry points to flawed GIS information

Flawed information flows affect safety

One of the major challenges facing the world's utilities is one of data management, optimizng information flows that involve multiple divisions within a utility. I have blogged about this challenge on multiple occasions (here, here, here and here).  This process needs to be optimized otherwise the quality of the information ("records") about the utility's overhead and underground infrastructure, where it is located and its maintenance history, is impaired, potentially leading to serious accidents like the gas explosions in Belgium in 2004 and the San Bruno explosion in 2010.

The basic process for designing, building and operating and maintaining a utilities network is essentially the same the world over and involves a cumbersome, inefficient, paper-based process.  Designers or planners create the initial design, called a construction drawing. Construction crews, often comprised of sub-contractors, build the facilities using paper construction drawings.  During construction, the drawing may be marked up or redlined to reflect changes in the original design.  After construction is completed, the construction drawing, now referred to as an "as-built", is forwarded to the records department.  The records department typically redrafts the paper as-built into the permanent records database, which is maintained as the company's record of its network infrastructure.

For work relating to connecting or disconnecting customers to the network, adding new services, repairing or replacing network facilities, and call-before-you-dig requests the records department is responsible for preparing maps showing the location of the utility's network facilities to assist field staff.  

The symptoms associated with a flawed process for managing records are as-built backlogs stretching from months to years, resulting in out-of-date data, and poor communication between the field and records staff, resulting in inaccurate data about network facilities in the records data base .  Inaccurate and out-of-date records not only reduce the productivity of field staff, but impact the safety of utility workers and the public, the primary concern of all gas and electric utilities.

San Bruno explosion

In the San Francisco Chronicle it was reported that "Federal investigators had determined that a major factor in the San Bruno explosion was PG&E's ignorance that its pipe had a seam running down the length of the line, which ruptured at an incomplete weld in San Bruno on Sept. 9, 2010.  Such a seam would have been noted on an accurate geographic information system report, and if it had, PG&E would have been legally obligated to prove it was in good condition."

Yesterday a utility company engineer testified that he "repeatedly told his bosses the company was relying on flawed data to vouch for the safety of its gas transmission lines before the San Bruno disaster, but that the utility took no steps to fix the problem."  He said that gas-system managers had ignored his and other employees' concerns that the company was relying on incomplete and inaccurate records contained in its geographic information system.

Optimizing information flow problem

The important conclusion here is that installing a GIS does not solve the fundamental problem, which is an information flow problem.  The most critical business process improvement is ensuring a digital information flow, pre-posting digital CAD designs directly into the records database, rather than redrafting the information from paper as-builts.  The second most important process improvement is proving a direct wireless link for field staff enabling them to participate directly in ensuring the quality of the records database. 

Heathrow Airport is an example where there is a lot of underground infrastructure, and it is an environment where even a minor accident carries the risk of serious consequences.  Heathrow has developed work processes around a data management system which ensures web-based access to high quality information about Heathrow's infrastructure.  At Heathrow standards, guidelines, and work processes are designed to ensure reliable data.  The most critical business benefit is safety.  Other benefits of Heathrow's apporach are that it minimizes rework, increases re-use of designs and provides for efficient handover for engineering designs from design to construction to operations. 

The direct benefits of business process improvement are eliminating the as-built backlog, with the important benefit that the records database is uptodate, and accurate data, because the entire field staff is participating in maintaining data quality.  Reliable data reduces the risk of accidents like Sana Bruno.  It also improves efficiency and productivity.  As utilities move to the new world of smart grid, or intelligent networks, reliable data about the network has become even more essential.

Autodesk announces Project Artoo for geospatial data cleanup

Project Artoo for AutoCAD Map 3D is a free technology preview available on Autodesk Labs.  Artoo is designed to cleanup geospatial data to correct common errors that can be introduced during digitizing, importing, surveying, scanning, and drafting such as duplicates, undershoots, snapping, dangles, node removal, sliver removal, and removing zero-length and short lines.

Project Artoo supports cleanup operations on FDO-connected data stores, including Oracle Spatial, Microsoft SQL Server, SDF, SQLite, and ESRI SHP files and geodatabases.

Geospatial World Forum: Unlocking quality asset information at Heathrow

Airports are like cities.  They have all the infrastructure that cities have plus some.  Heathrow is the busiest airport in Europe with on average 181,000 passengers passing through it each day.  Heathrow has 13 different types of infrastructure, some of which are unique to the airport environment.  To provide some idea of the magnitude of the infrastructure at Heathrow, there are more than 45 000 man holes, 72 miles of high pressure fire water mains, 81 miles of aviation fuel pipelines, and power cables carry voltages ranging from 9V up to 400 kV.

That is a lot of infrastructure to manage.  The challenge is made more difficult because it is an environment where even a minor accident carries the risk of serious consequences.  (At last year's Autodesk University, Shashi Verma gave a talk about asset management at Heathrow called Flying High: Multi-Utility and Infrastructure Project Implementation at Heathrow Airport.)

At the Geospatial World Forum, Nigel Stroud, Geometry Information Manager with the British Airports Authority (BAA) at Heathrow gave a fascinating talk about the Heathrow Map Live system which provides web-based access to high quality information about Heathrow's infrastructure.  The primary reason that access to quality information is important is for safety reasons, but there are also legal and contractual requirements, such as CDM (Construction Design Management) regulations. And there is an important efficiency dimension to this as well.

Single point of truth

To enable interoperability and open access to various types of data, Heathow has defined a Common Data Environment (CDE), the objective of which is basically a single point of truth.  The objective of CDE is to cultivate a culture where data is created once only and used many times.  Another way to put this is that each data element has a single owner and is shared across the organization.  Implementing this is much more difficult than it sounds.  In many organizations, different groups independently capture and maintain  information about the same assets.  For example, in a study of a single utility Gartner found that nine different groups were independently capturing and maintaining similar data about power poles. At Heathrow CDE means that standards,  guidelines, and work processes are designed to support a single point of truth.  The important business benefit from a cost perspective is that having a common data environment minimizes rework, increases re-use of designs and provides for efficient handover from design and construction to operations.

Data quality

Because safety is Heathrow's first concern, data quality is a top priority. Reliable data about infrastructure is required to respond effectively to an emergency as well as to provide information about the location of existing infrastructure to the more than a thousand contractors working at Heathrow at any given time.  In 2002 40% of Heathrow's underground facilities were mapped to within half a meter. Now 72% of the underground facilities are mapped to half a meter. 

In my view, the most important thing that Heathrow has done is designing business processes to optimize data quality.  For example, contractors at Heathrow are contractually obligated to progressively deliver as-builts over the lifetime of construction projects.  In other words, as-builts are not only required at the end of the project, but during the progress of construction, so that they can reviewed by BAA as work proceeds.

Heathrow has had an effective asset management system for capturing and maintaining information about infrastructure including infrastructure and building models, drawings, operations and maintenance reference manuals, and asset maintenance reports for many years, but has found it a challenge to provide access to this information across the business.  This is what the Heathrow Map Live system accomplishes, a single, simple web-based tool based on an Oracle database that allows everyone within the business to query, retrieve and view information about Heathrow's infrastructure.

Avoiding underground infrastructure during excavation

One of the major hazards of all construction activity is inadvertently hitting underground infrastructure.  To give some idea of how frequent this occurs, in the US in 2010 there were 112,917 incidents where underground utility facilities were hit during excavation.

At an airport this is particularly hazardous because not only are there gas mains and electricity distribution cables, but also aviation fuel lines and very high voltage power lines.   This is one of the biggest benefits of the Heathrow Map LIve system.  At Heathrow statistics show that the proportion of events where underground facilities were hit during excavation as a result of inaccurate information decreased by a factor of 6x from 2002 to 2011, primarily as a result of access to high quality information including location about underground infrastructure provided by Heathrow Map Live.

Geospatial World Forum: How GDF Suez built a gas distribution asset management system in 10 months

At the Geospatial World Forum in Amsterdam, Radu Negoita, GIS Manager at GDF Suez Energy Romania, gave a fascinating overview of how GDF Suez has built a location aware asset management system in 10 months.  Natural gas is a rapidly growing source of energy that is cleaner from an emissions perspective than traditional energy sources such as coal.

GDF SUEZ Energy România has over 1.3 million customers and is a leader in the gas distribution and delivery market.  Its main buiness is the distribution of gas to consumers. The total gas distribution network managed by GDF Suez  is 16,000 km.  Natural gas distribution is a regulated activity to ensure the safe operation of the network which is comprised of  pipes, residential connections, regulator stations, sensors/measurement systems, and other types of assets.

Data acquisition

In 2007 GDF Suez initiated a data acquisition project to capture information including location about all their network assets.  It is an ongoing effort using using internal resources.  GDF Suez relies on GPS and total stations to capture accurate locations for their assets.

Asset management system

The objective of the asset management system is to improve the productivity of gas distribution operations by automating manual asset management processes.  The core is an asset management system that manages the assets in a centralized database (Oracle Spatial) and provides desktop (AutoCAD Map 3D) and web based tools (Autodesk Infrastructure Map Server) for optimizing data quality and providing secure access to the information across the organization. The core database relies on data versioning (long transactions) to manage asset updates safely in a production environment.  It relies on an open architecture to enable integration with SAP plant maintenance, SynerGEE network analysis, and other enterprise systems.  It supports design sketches and redlining of design drawings and provides multi-criteria analysis for investment planning.

Project development

The project lifetime was ten months which, based on my experience with similar asset management systems in a range of utilities, I find quite remarkable in terms of how fast the production system was delivered.  This involved a full project lifecycle including business requirements analysis, development of the hardware and software architecture, installation of Oracle Spatial database and configuring the gas network model, configuration and installation of the application, data migration and testing and training.  The solution was deployed and in production in 2010 and currently supports 600 active users.

The system provides automated data capture from field measurement systems, multi-user editing of asset location and properties, creation and editing of network topology, generation of job estimates, tabular and graphical reporting, and provides an operations dashboard for monitoring progress and the status of the network.

The desktop client is used for field data acquisition, creation of the new assets; geometry, attribute and topology editing and network state analysis.

The web client, which is used by the majority of the users, provides a viewer for attributes and geometry of the network; navigation and searching of maps, and report generation.

Plant maintenance

Plant maintenance is based on a maintenance plan for all assets of the network including pipes, residential connections, valves, regulator stations, and so on.  The master system which manages the assets is the geospatial asset management system. SAP- PM manages maintenance network assets in terms of preventive and corrective maintenance.  It also handles exceptions and other operations events on the network.

Future developoment

GDF Suez' future development plans include integration of the asset management system with the SCADA, SAP asset accounting, and workforce management enterprise systems.  They also intend to develop a crew routing and dispatch module and a mobile client for field staff.

AU: Optimizing the information flow from designers to construction to records

One of the major challenges facing the world's utilities is one of data management, optimizng information flows that involve multiple divisions within a utility. I have blogged about this challenge on multiple occasions (here, here, here and here).  

The basic process for designing, building and operating and maintaining a utilities network is essentially the same the world over and involves a cumbersome, inefficient, paper-based process.  Designers or planners create the initial design, called a construction drawing. Construction crews, often comprised of sub-contractors, build the facilities using paper construction drawings.  During construction, the drawing may be marked up or redlined to reflect changes in the original design.  After construction is completed, the construction drawing, now referred to as an "as-built", is forwarded to the records department.  The records department redrafts the as-built into the permanent records database, which is maintained as the company's record of its network infrastructure.

The records database is used for a variety of activities such as reports about the network requested by the regulator or by management. For work relating to connecting or disconnecting customers to the network, adding new services, repairing or replacing network facilities, the records department is responsible for preparing facilities maps to assist field staff.  The symptoms associated with this process are as-built backlogs stretching from months to years, high error rates, and data quality.  Inaccurate and out-of-date records reduce the productivity of field staff and even impact safety, the primary concern of all gas and electric utilities.

Pacific Gas and Electric

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is one of the largest combined natural gas an electric utilities in the U.S. PG&E is based in San Francisco and serves 15 million people, about half of California's population.  

Steve Parker, EO Mapping Manager at PG&E, gave an insightful presentation at Autodesk University about the information flow challenge that PG&E is working to resolve, optimizing the flow of information from designers (Estimating), through the people who build the facilities (Construction) to records (Mapping).  As Steve expressed it their goal was to minimize the effort required to capture the true representation of the final installed assets by capturing the pertinent data into PG&E systems as early in the workflow as possible, in other words, to make it easier to share graphical information between Estimating, Construction, and Mapping.  Complicating issues include the lack of defined and enforced standards for network documentation (records).  Though it sounds simple, changing this process is an incredibly difficult undertaking because it affects a lot of people and involves changing business processes that date from Thomas Edison.  As Steve said, "We are going to make history".  

Eliminating redrafting

The most critical business process improvment is pre-posting designs directly into the records database, rather than redrafting the information from paper as-builts. If as-builts come back from the field with redlines, all that needs to be entered into the records database are the redlines.  

The direct benefit is eliminating the as-built backlog, with the important benefit that the records database is more uptodate.  Another benefit is fewer errors, because data is captured electronically rather than being manually redrafted from paper as-builts. 

Aging workforce and productivity

Another major benefit is improved efficiency and productivity.  PG&E, like many other utilities, is facing the challenge of an aging workforce.  For example, Steve said that half of PG&E's mappers are eligible to retire right now.  Streamlining information flows by eliminating paper helps both designers and mappers to be more efficient and takes a lot of repetiive drudgery out of the process.

Eliminating paper maps

Another important benefit is that it enables PG&E to get away from paper maps.  An advantage of electornic maps is that they can provide information in real-time.  Secondly, it means that printing 80,000 maps periodically is no longer necessary with savings of upto $8 million per year.