The Utility Symposium at Autodesk University yesterday provided a good overview of multiple scales of utility operations and a global perspective, with representation from North America, Europe and Australia. The focus was on the user, with presentations from a wide variety of electric and water utilities. It all kicked off with a “speed-dating” format aimed at creating a strong feeling of community among Autodesk’s utility customers. The event provided a forum for discussion among peer groups, an overview of process issues and some creative approaches to common challenges.
The first panel discussion started with a question about the challenges due to the down economy. Surprisingly, there was little lamenting with more of an emphasis on opportunity. Among the benefits of the slowdown have been more time to train, a chance to look more closely at process to improve efficiencies, the ability to improve business by focusing on key differentiators, and the benefits of adding top talent because so many good people are out of work.
Presentations began with Southern California Edison’s ambitious and long-term goals of a more streamlined operation. The utility needed to revamp a siloed operation that used to have five different crews in the field using five different systems. The revamped system has SAP at it’s core along with Autodesk’s utility design services (AUD). The utility is undergoing incremental change that focuses more on process than technology.
The utility makes great use of Google Maps and Google Earth Pro to form the basis of their base map for design projects. They haven’t decided on a GIS component yet for this major revamp, but did state that Oracle Spatial will be a key component and that they would be GIS “front end agnostic,” meaning that there would no longer be a GIS system competing against another within different parts of the organization. There are still a number of challenges for the utility to address, including a year of mapping updates backlogged, but they’re committed to organizational change as well as technology change with this process.
The panel discussion provided some good insight into utility data quality issues that expanded on the year of backlogs, and Google Maps as base layer. While this low-quality level seemed appalling to some, there were several surprising comments about the more the data is used the worse that it gets. The issue that all users shared is that any large-scale changes to systems cause great disruptions that take time to recover, and that lapses in funding for field data maintenance (often the reaction in a down economy) take a great deal of time to recover from.
When the panel was asked where they are placing their development emphasis, there was varied reaction. Las Vegas Valley Water is placing a great emphasis on custom solutions with Web 2.0 technologies, saying that the paradigm shift of the Web is upon us and that there’s great opportunity for collaboration. Nashville is placing greater emphasis on automated design process to streamline design work and create rules-based design criteria. The canton of Basel, Switzerland is taking a service-oriented architecture approach for the development of better tools and work processes that are “independent from technique,” stating that there’s now much greater opportunity to organize solutions around work. Hazen-Sawyer is working to leverage their model-based designs so that the utility of the model can live on with the client for ongoing maintenance.
Model-based design was prominent throughout the session, with more of an emphasis on 3D data and streamlined design workflows. As Parsons put it in their presentation, the traditional linear approach to design doesn’t work when moving to a collaborative model-based approach. There is a disruptive change that replaces the “relay race” approach with a more collaborative and streamlined process.
In the end, the issue still revolves around quality data for quality decisions, and a focus on streamlined and more inclusive process.
