Utility companies commonly use drones to assess electric power lines and structural assets and then identify necessary repairs or improvements needed for reliable operation and reduce wildfire risk. Business process workflows for drone assessment and repair programs require close coordination between many internal departments and third-party vendors.
GREAT Cloud Services centralizes the data needed from across many systems of record along with custom data management solutions into a single web-based, cloud-native application to consolidate the program’s workflow and reporting requirements. This makes the application the system of truth for a significant portion of the project, rendering reliable and actionable data in a single location for day-to-day operational use. The result is increased reliability, efficiency, and on or ahead-of-time compliant repair activity, thereby reducing risk and costs and offering a higher quality of service to utility ratepayers.
Does this situation seem familiar? Long email chains and large spreadsheets with tens of thousands of rows of data, plus ad hoc inputs by various team members that are difficult to track, manage, and run reports on. It leads to decreased efficiencies and increased risk of human data error that rapidly increase costs that are further amplified by the scale of the project. This method of record keeping and access takes a relatively simple set of tasks and processes and makes them complicated to accomplish and adds risk and costs that could otherwise be avoided.
The solution is a one-stop cloud-native application for people across the program, both internal and third-party, to improve the quality and reliability and make their efforts easier. It frees up time for the team to focus on complex issues that invariably arise, thus reducing risk and concern about routine management and operations..
The GREAT team utilized a serverless system architecture for the web application frontend and backend data storage, processing, and integrations on an integrated stack of 21 AWS services.
Quickly and easily take ad hoc inquiries from upper management and return data tables and/or graphs to put into their reports or communication chains.
Query for a particular utility asset, structure, or pole and see the historical lifecycle for that object across access protocol, land jurisdictions, airspace, drone flight history, assessments, repair construction, close-out, and beyond.
Manage large datasets that don’t perform well in spreadsheet format but perform tremendously under standards-based relational database systems and services provided by AWS.
Manage public outreach data to quickly identify utility asset access issues and increase safety for ratepayers, drone pilots, and repair crews and minimize unproductive site visits.
All business personnel has access to data in a centralized location for context and consistency. While some data may continue to be sourced from disparate systems on an operational basis, regularly aggregating it is part of the transition process to the centralized application becoming the primary and authoritative resource. Duplicate and inaccurate data entries are identified and removed, enabling quick access to correct data for timely decision-making for more efficient public outreach efforts.
Utility companies create a vast amount of data. A drone assessment and repair program requires information from various silo’ed systems to operate effectively.
The complexity associated with getting the correct information at the right time is inefficient and complex, resulting in lost time and mistakes.
By aggregating all data and creating one user access interface, redundancies and inconsistencies across the drone program are significantly reduced and reliability improved. Employees and managers can quickly retrieve relevant data for their decision-making, freeing up time to address other business needs.
