Utility Company Case Study

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Client:
The nation's sixth largest publicly owned electric utility, based on customers served. It generates, transmits and distributes electric power to a service population of 1.4 million people in a 900-square-mile service area.

Strategic Opportunity:
The utility company issued a competitive bid for a major data conversion project for its G/Electric geographic information system (GIS). The client was incorporating a strategic, company-wide SAP implementation and needed to populate the SAP with a robust GFramme spatial database. Apex CoVantage won the competitive bid based on price and speed and was chosen to build the database from existing electric facilities maps and records, as well as to furnish field data collection services to supplement the existing records.

Key Challenge:
The field data collection involved tracing each circuit's phasing from the substation out, establishing transformer-to-customer relationships and indicating obvious source discrepancies. The facilities were then geo-positioned onto the county land base and loaded into the companies G/Electric AM/FM/GIS, which is used to support business processes related to the analysis, design, operations and planning of the electrical distribution system.

Apex CoVantage Solution:
Apex used DataWorks^®, its open-systems, Oracle-based conversion technology, to convert nearly 3,000 overhead maps and almost 10,000 underground maps for the client. This innovative tool enabled the client to take a bold, pioneering step in integrating GIS technology with a company-wide, comprehensive SAP implementation for its business processes.

Result:
The client was so pleased with the quality of the conversion services provided by Apex CoVantage, that it contracted Apex to perform post-conversion data maintenance work for them on an ongoing basis. This maintenance work involves posting backlog work orders into a production database via a Citrix server.