Electric Network Designer Software heads to the Cloud
One of my favorite things about attending DistribuTech is meeting partners that are using our platform and technologies that I never knew about prior to the show. Every year we come away with a new gem and this year was no exception. The Power & Utilities team had the pleasure of meeting a partner called GeoSpatial Innovations. What makes GeoSpatial Innovations so exciting? They have a solution called GSI Designer that is used for designing overhead or underground electric lines while in the field. Their solution enables designers and engineers to quickly capture locations of structures and cables, add construction units and field notes for a complete paperless design in the field.
Ok, that’s sounds like a great solution, but why are we so excited? Because it runs in our industrial grade enterprise cloud platform Azure. With GSI Designer running in Azure, Utility network designers have a solution that cuts many of the manual steps out of the traditional design workflow resulting in big savings in efficiency allowing for easy access to data from anywhere, with automatic updates and minimal IT requirements.
GeoSpatial Innovations has a number of Utilities running GSI Designer in Azure. In one example at a major US Utility, the distribution group needed to change its design workflow to help reduce costs associated with designing new facilities as well as drive material savings from an optimized design performed in the field. The utility utilized hand-held GPS units that enabled the technicians to establish a design for the facilities that was optimized based on the lay of-the-land resulting in a better route from the tap point to the service drop. GSI Designer allowed this utility to realize substantial material savings through fewer poles, fewer guy-wires and optimal span lengths.
GSI Designer is a great example of our Mobile First, Cloud First vision and it is about breaking from the past and thinking differently about how we deliver business value to our customers and stakeholders. May the Cloud be with You! – Jon C. Arnold