From Paper to Survey 123 Updating the Transmission Inspection Process | SSP iLLUMINATE 2020

00:00 thank you again for joining us and welcome to today's illuminate webinar series today's topic
00:06 is from paper to survey123 updating the transmission inspection
00:15 process your speakers today are john thompson keith hupperts and nick
00:22 bauermeister and john has been with aep for 15 years working in the gis space
00:28 for about 25 years he was previously a gis services supervisor for the
00:35 transmission line engineering and is currently the product owner for the esri platform at aap
00:43 keith has been with ssp for three years and is working has been working with utilities on gis
00:49 projects for about 20 years he splits his time here at ssp between
00:56 working with customers as a senior solution art and he also serves as a product manager
01:02 for the jewelry used products fans and pull view nick has been with aap for over four years
01:10 he is a project manager over all engineering and right-of-way applications whether
01:16 developed internally by aep or source through vendors and just a note we'll be conducting a
01:23 formal qa's q a session following this webinar so if you do have questions please use
01:30 the question icon on the go to webinar panel to ask those and then finally a recorded version of
01:37 this webinar will be made at a a later date
01:43 and we will inform you when that is available and with that i am going to pass it over
01:49 to john
01:57 hello my name is john thompson and i'm here today from american electric power to talk about our transition from manual
02:05 site observations and forms to survey one two three
02:11 a little bit about aep we're a large utility we're in 11 states we operate 40 000
02:18 miles of electrical circuits and you know we go from the great lakes
02:23 down to the gulf gulf coast we have a very varied geography um quite a number of customers and quite
02:30 a number of challenges at the different sites currently they're upwards of over 5000
02:36 stations individual station sites let alone all the individual project sites construction sites lay down yards
02:43 etc where we collect these observations so we're spread out we need a mobile
02:49 tool and that gets us to kind of some of the business drivers or why we went this direction previously
02:58 we were using manual forms and spreadsheets etc to try to capture engineers observations
03:05 right away agents observations things like that for ongoing project work or just site
03:10 visitations things like that from safety to project statuses to observations in
03:18 general and trying to make it in an attempt to inform our production
03:24 our product or our capital production work our project efficiencies our safety
03:30 culture etc now that led us to some problems with those manual forms how do you
03:36 integrate that how do you integrate that into analysis of business intelligence and actionable items that we can work
03:42 off of so in the move over to survey123 it's on to an existing platform we've
03:48 been with esri for roughly 20 years and we've grown quite a bit
03:53 recently especially in the effort to push these tools into the field to the users who are actually using them
03:60 so we can collect them in an actionable manner some of the things here some things that we wanted to do
04:07 was integrate our existing all this information that we're collecting into other systems so we can analyze it
04:14 we'd like to integrate it integrate p6 and the project management information
04:20 software gates and timetables into this observation tool so we can match those up with the
04:26 capital workflow and also a little bit more maintenance and support costs
04:31 you know just maintaining that it's on an existing esri system we already had portal installed etc
04:38 and we've been using survey123 and a number number of other circumstances
04:43 and it also allows us a configurable interface so they aren't static forms they aren't printed forms they aren't in
04:50 some other medium which makes it very very laborious to put new forms out
04:56 there adjust forms and actually have this be reactive to what we're seeing and what
05:01 we need in the future going forward and with that we'll move over to implementation
05:06 with keith hubbards he was he was integral to the project and helping us implement
05:12 some of the customizations out of the base survey one two three and here he is thanks john
05:20 appreciate that interesting stuff to start out with and i'm going to jump in here and talk a
05:26 bit about the implementation process then i'll switch over talk about our solution for a little bit that we
05:32 implemented come back over to the implementation process and finish that discussion off
05:37 and then finally go through some tips and tricks on making the the web app that you put
05:44 together as user friendly as possible as well as the surveys themselves as user friendly
05:50 as possible so to start with this project like most projects follows
05:58 a kind of a a typical waterfall process of discovery collecting requirements both
06:04 functional requirements and techno technical requirements uh and then once
06:10 you're through there you start to define your solution a little bit more do some survey prototyping or
06:17 prototyping of what your results are gonna be and and so on and so forth until you get to the end
06:22 so in this case we started out with a week's worth of functional and technical requirements
06:27 meetings where we really tried to understand the
06:32 aep transmission business process and the requirements behind these forms
06:39 that they were gathering information in and how they were storing that information and how they wanted to use that information
06:46 to make sure that whatever solution that we did architect for them was going to meet those needs and they were going to
06:52 be able to really take advantage of the work that was going to be done here
06:57 so so the solution we came up with got named moss mobile online survey
07:03 system as a replacement to tsv and it's really based on the esri web
07:10 gis pattern of implementation where we're using the arcgis enterprise functionality as
07:18 close to out of the box as possible as little customization as possible
07:23 configuring it where we need to in order to meet all of the business requirements that aep's
07:30 transmission group had so we have arcgis enterprise using server and sde and a data store
07:38 and portal hosting everything and then that information that is stored in there
07:44 gets published up to a variety of client applications whether it's desktop application
07:50 web application or a mobile device and since this is primarily a
07:57 tool that's being used to collect information out in the field survey123
08:04 was a major component of what we decided to implement we looked at whether survey123 met their
08:10 requirements if collector might be a better suited solution for it or if a full-blown
08:17 commercial off-the-shelf off-the-shelf system would be a better solution uh survey123 really
08:24 clicked the boxes for for what uh aep wanted to be able to do and so we
08:30 started there and it's ended up working out very well um one of the important things to note
08:36 about this is that you see survey123 both at the desktop side there as well as on
08:42 a mobile device uh the workflow at aep is that uh usually
08:50 surveys start out in the field not always but usually they start out in the field
08:56 and once information is gathered in the field maybe not all the information that's
09:01 necessary is gathered in the field and it comes back into the the enterprise system
09:07 and somebody um maybe as part of a review meeting they have meetings called collaborative
09:13 reviews where they go through a lot of discussion about how a particular
09:19 construction project worked the that they would gather more information and add that information
09:25 into the survey so they wanted to be able to use survey123 both at the desktop and out in the field
09:33 and tying them together was a web application made through web app
09:39 builder and just through a lot of configuration we made this for that builder
09:45 application that would allow the users to be able to navigate via
09:53 a map to the facility that they were going to do their inspection on it could be a substation it could be a
10:01 transmission line facility and select that line and then select the
10:08 type of survey they were going to perform and start to interact with the survey but
10:15 there was a lot of data flow and workflow that went back and forth between survey123
10:22 and the the web app so you know the web app actually executed fired off
10:28 survey123 brought up the right form populated a number of the attributes that were
10:34 that were necessary for the form the users would fill out the form and submit that back and then go
10:42 and then during other meanings potentially have to open those forms
10:48 back up and add additional information back into those survey records using survey or i'm
10:54 sorry using the web app builder so there's a lot of data flow between the two applications
11:02 but that's all supported through the gis pattern the other thing that we had to be
11:08 cognizant of is a couple of integrations two primary ones that we had to worry about
11:14 the first one being aep's construction project management system this system called ecosys that contains
11:22 all kinds of details about their large construction projects that happen at substations and on
11:28 transmission lines has vital information that was important to link in with the survey123 data
11:36 so we had to bring that data in through a web api that was really big
11:43 created in the ecosys system it already existed in ecosystem for integrating that data and pushing that data out to
11:50 their enterprise data warehouse we were able to piggyback off of that and have that
11:55 information brought into the gis as well and then we would publish that information up as
12:01 part of the um the facilities feature service and so we had access to it through the
12:09 um the the web application the other integration that we had to
12:14 do is take data out of sde once the survey was complete and push it
12:20 into their bi system and they're using cognos we had a lot of discussion about whether
12:26 or not something like operations dashboard
12:32 would meet their reporting requirements and ultimately
12:38 aep decided that they have a bi system it's their corporate
12:43 standard and they want to push people towards that as much as possible so rather than having a separate
12:51 tool that produces a bunch of metrics and kpis and displays within
12:59 the gis using operations dashboard we decided to push information over to
13:04 cognos because cognos has not only the ecosystem and the gis
13:10 data not the survey data but also other facility information as well as
13:18 employee information and managers and direct reports and being able to query on
13:24 who's who of your direct reports are doing surveys versus not doing
13:29 surveys and having all that information readily available in one spot
13:34 made the most sense so back to the implementation process
13:40 after we had kind of built out that solution architecture and defined what that was
13:45 going to be we prototyped out all the surveys we socialized those with
13:51 the the end users and the folks who needed to be able to see that got feedback on it made sure that we
13:58 incorporated any changes that were necessary as a part of that we found that there
14:04 were three additional surveys that we needed to incorporate into the system where people said oh yeah those
14:10 12 are are good um but you know what we also want these
14:16 other three and then actually eventually somebody came back and said you know these two are basically the
14:22 same and we're going to get rid of one of them so we ended up with
14:28 with 14 different surveys as opposed to 15 but we ended building 15 and only
14:34 implementing 14. we also found that there was a
14:41 there was a sharepoint site that was capturing um those capturing information on human
14:49 safety and making sure that that folks were if there were any safety issues they
14:55 were getting captured in what they were and being addressed and they could be simple
15:00 safety issues and they could be more dangerous safety issues those that sharepoint site was
15:09 really kind of a subset of information that people were collecting as they were doing these surveys and so we ended up
15:15 incorporating all the questions that were in that sharepoint site into the surveys themselves so that
15:22 there wasn't two places to capture that information it's just all done in one spot
15:28 of course lots of testing ensued after we had the solution developed aep
15:35 has a great group of of testing resources and they really made sure that survey123 did exactly
15:42 what it said that the surveys did exactly what they were supposed to do that you know validation occurred
15:48 exactly how it was supposed to workflow worked how it was supposed to
15:54 we put together a couple of training guides for the end users and and then
16:01 finally rolled the system out really they've rolled out in late
16:08 january of this year so right around the january february time frame
16:13 so just in time for cody to come in and and really slow down adoption
16:22 but it is being adopted not as quickly as aep would help or i would hope but it is
16:28 being adopted and will continue to be adopted and grow as as time goes on
16:35 so i wanted to also mention a couple of things around building web apps that are user friendly
16:41 first and foremost the more you can configure both for your maps as well as your apps
16:47 the more cost effective it's going to be for you you're going to minimize your cost of
16:52 ownership if you don't customize stuff things like making your uh
16:57 your feature services and your maps part of the locator widget that comes up inside of your
17:05 of your app is also very helpful so being able to have a user search by
17:12 substation name or by a transmission line name or id as opposed
17:18 to having to type in the address of a substation because they probably don't know the address of the substation but they know
17:24 the name of it being able to use those key fields to quickly navigate to
17:29 features inside of your map and your app are really helpful and then being able to support that
17:36 workflow are the different workflows that we talked about earlier through widgets like the editor widget and the
17:43 smart editor widget which provide similar but slightly different capabilities within your web app are
17:51 also really valuable things and so like the smart editor widget allowed
17:57 people to collect data use survey123 even if they might not have connectivity be able to
18:05 collect that information link it back into the gis and then
18:11 use the smart editor to type in lat long information and generate a
18:16 point at that location so very very useful tools to include
18:25 of course being able to just configure that that api that took data out of the
18:31 construction project management database and sending it over to to
18:36 the moss application was also very useful as opposed to having to develop something
18:42 from scratch but then also configuring it so that it was readable by the web app uh
18:49 provided even more value and that was just you know easy configuration the one thing that we
18:56 did have to go and do some customization on was
19:01 we built a widget that allowed the end users to have a drop down list
19:08 of all the different surveys they could choose from that drop down list which server they wanted to do an
19:14 inspection on they click on that survey fill out some additional information
19:19 about the substation or transmission line that
19:24 they were going to do an inspection on and then in another section of the widget populate
19:32 information from the ecosys system so they could build the link between ecosys data and the gis
19:40 data which really there was no there was a link in there other than just they were both
19:47 had information about the same assets but no database link there so we had to build
19:52 that manually and and that widget allowed the users to
19:59 to go through and not only say it's what substation that they were working in
20:05 both from the gis side and the ecosystem but then also assign the work that they were doing to
20:10 specific projects within that substation or our transmission line
20:16 and then finally survey123 when you click on open up your survey it fires off
20:24 the web app will open up survey123 open up the specific survey type that
20:29 you selected and then pass a number of parameters and that will populate a
20:35 bunch of the fields automatically all through configuration
20:41 and then as far as building out nice readable surveys there's a few things that you want to
20:48 pay attention to first of all from a usability standpoint spend the
20:53 time to go through your existing forms and validate all the questions in the choice
20:59 list make sure that they are still the questions that you want to be asking and the answers that you want
21:05 to be receiving [Music] you know so we found that there were
21:10 whole sections of some surveys that were no longer relevant because business processes have
21:16 changed and our tools had changed and they weren't even using those tools that the
21:22 questions were asking about so you know make sure that the information that you're
21:27 asking people to collect is is important otherwise they're gonna not really think
21:34 it's that great of a tool secondly around choiceless in this particular example here
21:39 you can see that we had the original question had for question number two had a scale of
21:45 one to ten as far as like how what was the quality of the drawing package that was provided
21:53 well you don't really need ten choices there does it meet your expectations does it not meet your expectations
21:59 does it exceed your expectations it's really what we wanted to get to and then depending upon how you selected
22:04 the answer there you might be required to if you say it's below expectations you'd be required to
22:12 provide a little bit of input as far as what was not up to snuff survey123 also
22:18 has the ability to have these groups some of our surveys that we were working on had
22:24 hundreds of questions and not being able to you don't want to have to scroll through
22:29 hundreds of questions if you don't have to use so if you can group those questions into
22:35 manageable chunks um then it's easy to open and close those chunks and answer
22:41 the specifics around that and navigate through different parts of your survey to maybe not necessarily answer the
22:48 questions in a linear order and also just markup tags within the surveys themselves being able to
22:56 make the questions bold or some headers bigger than the answers helps to really
23:03 make the questions pop and the response in a slightly different uh
23:10 non-bold font then becomes uh you know more obvious what you're what
23:15 you're supposed to be doing uh final thing to talk about with that was uh
23:21 regarding the the individual instance of a survey and its name
23:26 so if you just use the default uh in survey123 every survey is called in this case p c
23:34 e cert site visit and if you do five of them you have five surveys called pce site visit in your out box
23:42 if you want to open one of them up and make some changes to it you gotta kind of you know open each one
23:50 up until you find the right one so putting in some additional tags in
23:55 that name such as in our case we did facility id uh whether it was a transmission line or
24:02 a substation name as well as the date to make that more legible to the users and more meaningful for the users
24:11 additionally there's a few other things that you can do to make your surveys a little bit easier to use
24:18 especially if you have a lot of photos that you want to capture we used esri's attachment capability to
24:26 capture images and and with that then you have to make use of repeats inside of your survey so that
24:35 you can have those related records appear in in related records
24:40 and also we used a group so that they could easily be opened and closed as a group and i guess
24:48 how that ends up looking in your survey is something like this where we have at the bottom of the survey all
24:54 the different site visit photos that are associated with this particular survey and you can add
24:60 as many as you want you can delete some if you get the wrong ones you can also add files if you want to let's say attach
25:07 some some standards associated with the component that's being surveyed make
25:14 sure that that's accurate you can include that information in there as well
25:19 all of this was done using feature services that are based off of sde as opposed to hosted feature
25:26 services so data when it came back from the field was written automatically to your
25:32 geodatabase as opposed to being put into a feature service that
25:40 potentially could be written to your geodatabase if you wanted to in the future everything just came straight back into
25:45 your geodatabase in this case and for aep that was uh
25:51 great because their their cognos team did not want to have to try and read
25:57 the rest end points of the surveys in order to figure out what information they needed to send
26:03 back to the enterprise data warehouse they wanted to be able to run queries inside of the
26:10 sde database because that's what they were comfortable with and grabbed the information that had changed and it had
26:16 been updated and pushed that over to cognos
26:23 and with that i'm going to pause and i'm going to turn it over to
26:30 nick bauermeister and he will do a demo of the solution for you folks thanks
26:40 all right thank you keith my name is nick bauermeister i work in transmission i am a pm and i was fortunate enough to
26:47 work with keith on rolling out moss i'm going to jump right into how the application works
26:52 start at the beginning of the workflow work all the way to the end to the reporting and analytics side so
26:58 let me go ahead and jump right in okay this is moss this is the main page
27:06 i'm going to be simulating working on a mobile device but this is basically
27:12 what a user would see if they were on their mobile device as you can see there's layers that have
27:19 been brought into the application from our arcgis platform so we have some transmission layers the moss widget is the main place where
27:26 users will go in and initiate selecting assets and we'll get to that here in a minute
27:32 there's also the ability to zone in on your location so like i was saying if you're on a mobile device
27:38 you would likely hone in your location and start the workflow from there but there's a layers list another highlight
27:45 these are all the different forms there's 14 different forms that we work with the smes on to develop
27:51 and you can go through and turn these layers on and off as you're probably familiar with with
27:58 gis systems and for this one for example if i wanted to turn
28:03 my transmission lines on or off i just toggle the button on and off we had each of the forms be their own layer
28:11 so as form content as people fill out forms in the field if they wanted to go in say your
28:17 supervisor or manager or even just a general user you do have the ability to have that data
28:22 segregated so you could go in and we'll scroll up here in a second
28:28 and you can we'll actually we'll go through this a little bit later in a demo you can select some of these layers here
28:33 you have a protection and controls layer a right-of-way layer and go through and
28:39 actually see the surveys that have been submitted in those areas on the map so also you have the ability to
28:47 change your base map as is pretty standard in gis applications so i'll probably change
28:54 this a little bit later just so you can see better the results that i just referred to but um yeah just your standard base maps
29:01 are here uh we'll select a different one just so you can see the better picture of the geography and
29:08 this is my current location you can see on the left hand side how i've kind of zoomed in on that location you can also
29:15 see the line uh information so there's no stations out where i'm at but
29:20 there is a line as you can see this kind of a colored line that goes from north south this is one of the just
29:27 some detail we brought in from our tgis system that shows you know when
29:32 the line was installed in 1974 and so forth so you can also search for
29:39 assets line and station assets what uh which i just searched for was a station called jug street station
29:46 so i searched in the top right hand box and it'll bring up you know not only just our stations and
29:51 our lines but it also bring up anything that matches the search criteria and you can bring it up on the map so you can see
30:00 uh station listed all the station information listed here
30:05 you can zoom to the location it's not already zoomed you can see the x and y coordinates
30:11 and a bunch of other metadata tied to that station this just happens to be a station that's
30:16 close to our corporate offices so what i was going to show you here now
30:22 is the layers that i was referring to so i'm just going to go ahead and turn on all the layers
30:27 uh like i said there's 14 different forms that we work with the smes to develop and these little icons that
30:34 i'm expanding right now well you should see this pop up on the map here in a minute
30:40 those are basically how you reference the results the survey results so say the right-of-way site visit team
30:46 have done a bunch of surveys a bunch of little red stars will pop up so we'll show that here in a second
30:52 another feature would be your attribute table so i'm going to zoom out a little bit so i can
30:58 pick up some more data but when you click on these tabs
31:04 down below and i accessed it by just clicking on the little arrow at the bottom middle of the screen
31:09 you can also bring up all of the results of all the site visits that have been
31:15 the data has been collected on so this one's a protection and control site visit form uh the results are all in a
31:21 like an attribute tabular format and i could also see the results on the map
31:27 i can also see them down below so as you can see there's a bunch of different tabs there where you can
31:32 actually hone in on that location on that data so i'm going to change the base map so we can see it's a little better
31:37 so the little green stars for example are
31:44 survey results so we have a handful of folks that have done some surveys at the kirk jug street line and then
31:51 we've had some folks do some surveys out here in basically the eastern side of
31:57 ohio and if you want to drill down into any of the photos you can drill down into the photos and there's
32:03 even an hpi table that we could drill into this human performance indicators for safety
32:09 reasons there's some questions that are linked to that as well so as you can see we've got some purple
32:14 stars here show some example questions that are on that survey and some answers that a user has filled
32:21 out in the field and so you can see all the questions there if i go to the smart editor tool tool i can see the results and if i
32:28 wanted to change any of these i could now ideally you fill all these out in the field and everything's just perfect but
32:33 say you get back to the office and you realize something has changed and you want to update it
32:39 that's perfectly fine in the application you could go through and and select from
32:44 any of the drop down menu items that are the yes or no question answers for the questions you can even
32:50 edit your geometry if you wanted to and move the the the actual pin or the
32:57 minute ago we looked at little stars little purple stars and so forth you could basically move the x and y coordinates if you wanted to
33:03 um not likely but in this case if i wanted to go in and add the asset id information later i could
33:11 again these are just in case you know just for non-perfect scenarios i need to go in and actually
33:16 add content that didn't get collected in the field you have that option
33:22 this just another example of a survey that was filled out you can see the asset information listed
33:29 here you'll see not only the line information but the station information
33:37 and now let's go ahead and just basically go through and walk through a scenario so in the field
33:42 i would likely just hone in on my location uh which is what i just clicked on i
33:49 would pick a survey to fill out so i had this 14 different surveys i'm just going to do a general observation survey
33:56 i don't have any stations in my location so i don't show any stations listed below it'll query basically a table and say
34:04 you know look bring up any location or stations in your location or lines in your your location in your map and in this
34:11 case i'm going to do the gavin's marysville line uh and then i'm going to go down to the bottom and select some of our
34:17 project information our tjs system with all the stations and lines and then
34:23 the project related information are technically two separate tables we don't have those
34:28 linked together right now so it's not necessarily a shortcoming in the application it's just a challenge for us
34:33 to link all this information together but as you can see i i go through the bottom and really just
34:38 drill down on different level detail on what assets i'm actually doing a
34:43 site visit on and what's what the project ids i'm doing my site visit on so in
34:49 this case we selected one of our operating companies i'm going to do transco ohio there's 496
34:55 results will show up and then i would go through and select the associated
35:01 asset now in this case i'm going to switch and go through one more scenario this is actually um i want to make sure
35:08 that we select this using the uh a stationary line that matches so if i go through and i select a station
35:15 in this case i'm going to select babit you can see it show up in the screen and then i go through and select transco
35:20 ohio i can go through and select the associated let the data load real quick
35:27 there we go 360 results i can go through and you can see babbitt show up and this will basically
35:34 is the the budgeted project id uh we have a variety of different you know work that's been done on that
35:40 station so i just happened to pick the one that was associated with the work that was recently done so now as you see as you
35:48 you click on the the mobile app basically opens the survey123 app
35:54 and it pulled in the asset information for babbitt i pulled in my bp ids from our ecosystem
36:01 and i can go ahead and start filling out the form so this is a simulation of me filling this out on a mobile device but
36:06 i could go through and you know move my gps coordinates around should i need to but your device should take care of all that
36:13 you go through and select a date all these are defaulted to be collapsed but if you
36:18 want to change them so that they default to being expanded that's something that keith can definitely work
36:23 with you on you can see how i have 1024 characters that i can enter into the description field so we worked all
36:30 that out ahead of time i'm just going to throw some sample text in here i can identify all the information that's
36:37 pertinent to anyone doing a site visit at aap we have a quarterly mandate that
36:45 engineers and right-of-way associates get out to the field and actually do site visits and these are all just key
36:52 questions that were defined ahead of time so as the user goes out and if they observe things they can capture all the information
36:59 it's standard for this particular one i'm just selecting medium i'm going to go into
37:05 selecting some photos now so you can add files or photos in this case i'm going to select the
37:10 file but if i was a select photo it would access your mobile device camera and you
37:16 could take some pictures you can add more than one picture you can add a caption to each of your photos that's something
37:23 that it would be advanced an advantage down the road so you should you want to perhaps search for a group
37:29 of photos that you've taken but you do have the capacity to add files or folders here as many files and
37:35 folders as you want all right so basically after adding your photos your files and
37:42 your captions and you've answered all your questions some other questions are required you can work that out ahead of time
37:47 so it's configured that certain questions are required before anyone could submit once you've done all that you click the
37:53 check box and you can submit i'm going to say send later now because perhaps i want to finish some
37:60 some work around the station of the line and then come back to it so if i'll see it in my out box i can
38:05 see this right here where if i want to go through and complete the survey i can complete it or not in this case i'm going to select
38:12 no but again ideally you come back and you say yes i want to fill this out and i've
38:18 collected all the information i've verified everything everything looks good click the check box and say send now and
38:24 that'll process the information over the arcgis database and we're going to jump and that's it and we're going to jump back
38:30 to the mobile web app right now and what i'm going to do is
38:36 basically refresh and you can actually see my survey results
38:41 and you will also start getting into how you can actually extract some of those results
38:47 we did push all of this information over to our cognos universe so so we'll go into that at the very end
38:54 but for just basic querying you can use some of the map features and
39:00 like i'm going to show here in a second i'm going to turn off a bunch of layers so it really focuses on one particular
39:05 layer the layer that's associated with the form that i just did which is the general observation form
39:12 i'm going to show that on my map i move the geometry around a little bit so it'll probably drop me somewhere in the
39:17 middle of columbus ohio not actually where i'm at right now but
39:23 let's go ahead and find this real quick and then i'll show you how you can see some of the data so you can see right there i had the
39:30 what i filled out today i can double click on it and it'll zoom me into that location anything that's on the map
39:36 will show on the attribute table behind below so i double clicked on it and zoomed in
39:42 for me i can see those are all the answers i submitted i can click on the ellipse if i want and go through and edit the
39:48 questions i can see some of my photos i'm going to actually pull one of my photos here in a
39:53 second so you can see how that opens just click on the link pulls that that was the file the file that i had attached not photo
40:01 but file but you could do either or um so there and if i uh say zoom out on
40:06 this map a little bit and it shows all of basically dayton in columbus ohio
40:12 you can see multiple records show up double click on the row it'll zoom in on the survey results
40:21 and if i wanted to go in and edit it i can there are a couple different ways you can edit
40:27 forms if you want to actually delete the records say it was filled out an error there's actually a way to do that too
40:32 so we're not going to go into that detail but going back into the
40:41 editing of the file okay so on the middle of the screen you can
40:47 see how i could go in and edit and delete the record if i needed to now you have to have certain
40:53 rights to do that but in my case i have that access you can control what users are able to
40:59 see here if you want um but yeah in my case i can i can delete so all right so now we're going to go into
41:06 the attribute table and extracting some of the results you can just simply go to the options on
41:11 the far left hand side i'm going to pan out a little bit so that i can get some additional results if i have
41:18 any for the general observations forms in this case i'm just going to
41:23 zoom out to see that there's been one collected and i just click export and it exports it
41:29 basically in csv format or excel and cell excel open with the data
41:36 and again this is just your basic reporting say if you wanted to go in and see everything that was
41:43 entered for a particular area you zoom in and out this pan to whatever level you want and
41:50 then you can go through and extract some of the basic data this brings in you know your question your answer your asset information your
41:57 x and y the data was filled out uh all that information is extracted right here you
42:03 can't extract your photos and everything here but you can extract the tabular data and this is a
42:09 the cognos environment we built so we have all of the joins hooked up here we brought in some
42:15 additional tables so we could link some more of our our person information so our active
42:20 directory information our supervisor who's a supervisor what's their first and last name all that kind of stuff we didn't need to
42:26 store all that in the moss database so linking that to our active directory was
42:31 made most sense so you can see the 14 different forms here we have some of the
42:38 additional tables here we built some dashboards these are just some basic dashboards
42:43 that were put together so you if you were someone trying to see how many say you're in station engineering we have things broken out in
42:49 the 14 different forms basically by discipline so you have station and pnc and you have right-of-way so if you wanted to go see who's
42:56 actually doing the site visits and by a particular opco operating company
43:02 or if you want to see who in general has completed surveys in particular areas that's what you can show so aep
43:10 had an older system called tsv transmission site visit and that system
43:17 was basically a paper-based system people could go into the application and
43:22 they would basically manually print out a form and then they would take that form and
43:28 go to the field and then they'd bring it back and and then when they got around to entering the information they key it
43:34 into us our tsp system which was you know it kept the information in a
43:40 database and you could do some reporting at it but the fact that you had to manually type it all in was very time
43:46 consuming and uh although most people i'm sure took those forms and they entered the
43:53 information into our tsv system it added risk that somebody would lose the form and then have to go back out to
43:59 the site or perhaps they lose the form and and wouldn't actually the data would never make it to the the
44:05 system so being able to use a mobile device to capture the information capture photos which couldn't be
44:12 captured in the previous system is definitely a big advantage um so it definitely streamlined the process of
44:19 doing site visits and the analytics piece just helps with managing of the actual results uh in the
44:25 past we had some basic reporting that we could run but the fact that we have cognos at our
44:31 fingertips to create all kinds of fancy dashboards and reports just makes the application even more
44:37 likely to be utilized and the information is technically real time
44:42 so as long as you have filled out the form and you have a network connection uh at the time you filled it out that
44:49 data becomes available instantaneously and if somebody needs to take action on
44:54 a particular safety issue or maybe they see it you know a concern with something that's been installed
45:00 there's something needs replaced people are making decisions on that information as soon as it's received instead of it
45:06 sitting on someone's car for a day and then it sits on someone's desk perhaps for a few hours i mean it's
45:13 it's instantaneous so that's been one of the biggest advantages to the tool is to be able to
45:19 grab the information on a mobile device which we didn't have before and have the information be available
45:25 right away all right well thank you very much
45:32 thanks nick that was great so that's our presentation and now let's answer some questions from
45:38 the audience okay so we have several questions that
45:46 have come in already um i'm not sure who wants to take this one you might want to make sure your phones
45:53 are unmuted panelists and the first question is i may have missed
46:00 it but are these area aerial or ground surveys or both
46:10 um i'll go ahead and take that one if you want key these are ground surveys so these
46:15 are physical engineers and resources going to job sites and completing surveys and
46:22 assessments so it isn't survey in the sense that it's it's a geographic survey or spatial
46:28 survey these are information uh collecting condition surveys in different locations for
46:35 different for different reasons
46:41 excellent thank you john all right the next question this is a double question here
46:46 two questions one is the sde versioned and two how do you handle security do you have user
46:52 accounts on the server to log in and access the services
46:58 um keith you can answer that one or i can it's that's fine um it's
47:05 it's handled through corp corp credentials so i mean all the members to to use the
47:12 application or survey 123 form you have to have a portal account which is handled um through
47:18 corporates so it's it's kind of uh in line
47:23 with you know every member of the application would have a portal account on our our internal implementation
47:38 sounds good thank you john next question do you use offline editing workflows in the field
47:48 um again this is john again um actually that was essential one it was it was one of our
47:54 requirements um because so many of our are you know we have a lot of space to cover
48:03 so once you get down in the mountains in appalachia or out west texas different areas you know there isn't
48:08 you're not connected all the time you can still collect those surveys and they'll sync up when you when you are
48:15 connected to a to a network but yeah
48:21 okay it looks like key puppets might be having some sound we can't hear him so you might have to
48:26 take a couple of these um john and so here's the next one
48:32 um how do you handle editing controls can users only edit their own surveys
48:42 another two-part those were yeah um do you want me to cover that one first or was it
48:52 okay yeah those are handled through user roles on the portal side so you know there are certain accounts
48:59 you could you could edit your own record but different roles on the uh on portal
49:06 would be able to to access and edit other you know other roles but that we handle that primarily through
49:13 custom roles on the portal side
49:18 thanks john all right next up do you use offline editing workflows in the field
49:26 i think you did awesome
49:32 yeah i think we did i mean yeah that was one of our key rights yeah okay so let me move on to the next one
49:38 here um is the moss web app using arcgis line online or
49:43 portal that's using an internal portal implementation we do
49:50 have arcgis online but not really used for those production level apps
49:55 there were internal integrations to be to be worked out he mentioned ecosys and and cognos et cetera it was it was a
50:03 portal um a portal product okay yeah he just responded never mind i just
50:09 heard it with portal so um sounds good all right why did you guys choose this
50:17 tool over a project-based workflow tool like procore or kahua or
50:23 bim 360. well you know for my knowledge and
50:30 obviously with my choice i am from the gis but this project actually
50:35 was initiated from a need and functionality request from engineering and they're used to using some other
50:41 tools now we had some advantage and what led us more towards the survey123
50:47 esri kind of solution is it's an established platform we had
50:52 it stood up and it was somewhat and there was there was a little bit of familiarity with
50:58 with the application to begin with with end users so we've used survey123
51:04 in various short-term surveys um things you know not production level
51:10 tools but but uh one-off collection attempts and things like so there was some
51:16 familiarity with the system it's ease of use and support considerations going on
51:22 so choosing a a different tool might have required different maintenance and and
51:28 that tail might have been longer on the other end whereas survey123 we've kind of adapted a
51:35 philosophy of you know if the container exists if we're at 80 we'd rather spend our development on the
51:42 actual custom functionality we need as opposed to redesigning a box
51:48 and and you know there might have been an off-the-shelf program that might have made that might have hit 80 percent of some
51:54 of some of what we wanted in the requirements but the ease of configuring um the survey 123 app to close that gap
52:03 and get it closer to 95 100 of their requirements
52:08 kind of kind of kind of weigh the scales so we found that you know a lot of the a
52:14 lot of the canned apps on the portal program offer us an opportunity to to focus on that last
52:20 remaining 20 and not redevelop the box and it's and it's built to be configurable
52:26 so we don't have to go back to the vendor or some other third party a lot of times
52:31 to to do that last 20 percent and actual focus on on what we need
52:39 okay um thanks for that um a question from my good friend tom did you consider
52:47 mims um we have taken a look at that um that's
52:53 more of a comprehensive um you know i won't speak to other
52:58 things but you know it's actively being looked at for other for other applications within aap
53:07 perfect all right next up what advantage is having the results
53:13 of the surveys on a map as opposed to just storing the information in tables and doing reporting
53:18 on non-spatial data well a lot of it especially in the
53:25 utility industry everything is spatial so you know there
53:30 are components there's questions that we couldn't ask before because you know obviously we
53:35 didn't have the information or it would be a little bit harder but just for instance you know where are
53:40 people going out for these site surveys nick mentioned in his part of the presentation that a lot of these are
53:47 mandated so we have we have standards and guidelines of how many times an engineers have to go out
53:53 and do site visits how many times they have to do certain safety visits things of this nature
53:59 and this way we can visualize where where people are going and we can address that you know some of
54:04 the some of the things we might look at are are all the you know we're local our corporate headquarters and our transmission headquarters
54:10 are located in columbus ohio so a lot of there's a lot of personnel there while we want to hit other
54:17 stations outside of columbus and central ohio you know so if we notice that a lot of the site visits
54:24 or a lot of the safety you know these different types of forms you know surveys that they're filling out are all around columbus we can
54:30 address that and we can address that through policy and process procedures you know we can ensure that
54:37 we're getting a good representative coverage of our network and sites so it allows us to answer more questions
54:44 and to answer those questions more effectively to to be more effective in in our work
54:51 processes okay um let's see here what
54:56 caused you to lock down wait a minute you read this again what caused you to lock this down to
55:02 just your engineering and right-of-way teams
55:11 yeah this is keith i finally figured out how to unmute myself here so um i apologize for for um having you
55:19 get put on the spot there but uh that was kind of a it was a business
55:25 decision uh and we wanted to make sure that um that access was provided to the to the right
55:32 people uh as far as being able to collect surveys and and then update them um so you know
55:40 the people who are normally going out and doing the were in the past doing the tsb uh survey
55:46 and collecting that information on a paper format we provided those folks with
55:51 access through groups inside a portal and then and then also with the
55:57 ad permissions and groups there as well so they could configure it at uh at the
56:03 active directory level and then just sync that in with with portal um and just to make sure that the right
56:10 people had had the right access but then it was opened up for other folks to be able to do
56:16 uh queries and read and viewing of the information as well
56:23 all right thanks keith we're running close on time we have a few questions we may not get to all of them but let me ask
56:28 one uh sneak one in here how does the system work when the user loses cellular access
56:38 uh i'll take that one too john if that's okay
56:43 so you know survey123 uh works if you have the surveys downloaded
56:50 onto your device and um once you open up a survey uh the first time it downloads that
56:57 survey template down to your device so the next time you want to
57:02 create a survey it's just opening up the local version of the survey and and allowing you to fill it out
57:10 so if you didn't have cellular access the web app wouldn't work but you could
57:17 still go in and collect information using just survey123 fill out your your
57:22 information around your site visit collecting all of the the different uh conditions that you
57:28 were inspecting uh whether it was equipment conditions or um
57:34 civil uh information as far as like uh grading and things like that so you can
57:41 still collect all the information that you need um or if you're out on a transmission area a transmission line and you're doing an
57:47 inspection on that you can still collect that information that's kind of a place where you're more likely to not have
57:53 connectivity than if you were at a substation and then once you once you collect that
57:59 information it still gets synced back into the gis and survey123 does collect a
58:05 xy location for you but it gets linked in back when you have
58:11 connectivity once again so it'll cache that information and then sync it once
58:16 connectivity is restored and then you can go back into the web app if you want uh either from
58:23 your desktop when you're back in the office or from your mobile device and and make
58:28 some additional updates to it and maybe move that point around a little bit to make it a little bit more precise
58:34 that was collected using the smart editor widget
58:40 okay thanks for that thank you john keith and nick for your presentation today we thank you all for joining us today
58:46 and