My coworker, Brian Higgins, wrote a post a while back on using the “keep it simple stupid (KISS)” principle when it comes to technology. Sometimes I don’t think we embrace this principal enough!

I have recently been working on a large scale Schneider Electric Designer™ implementation and the customer wanted to capture field as-built redlines digitally for use in the back office.

We first reviewed the usage of ArcFM Viewer™ and various other GIS-based technology processes but our experience with these implementations has been the opposite of the KISS principal and we have ended up with a very complicated solution that worked some of the time.

Instead we took a step back to business requirements to see if we could engineer a simpler, sturdier solution to the challenges at hand:

• The approved back office design work print needs to be made available digitally to the field crews
• The crews need to be able to easily open the design print without having to go through complicated searches
• The crews need to be able to easily apply redline markup to the design prints
• The crews need to be able to save the redlines with a single click
• The redlines had to be accessible to the back office for application to GIS
• The solution needed to handle assignment of the job to multiple crews for joint trench gas and electric jobs (allow multiple crews to capture redline as-builts during the same time period)

We decided to utilize the Designer™ product where it was strongest – in the creation of the design prints. The design print could be a single page or multiple pages for a larger job or a job with additional CAD detail or pictures.

These design prints were already being exported to PDF format so they could be attached to the integrated Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system. So we designed a simplified process to issue those same design prints out to the field in PDF format, keeping in mind all of the key business requirements listed above!

To demonstrate this process, we’ll pick up the workflow at the stage where the designer has created a design print for the approved design job. This is a simple job to drop in a new pole, new transformer and service to two parcels as shown in the middle of the print.  

This design print PDF is automatically saved into a configured network folder that is marked for mobile access. The mobile access folder is organized by the type of work – electric, gas, water, or joint trench which will allow the different types of crews to subscribe to the different types of mobile PDFS: 

At the same time the PDF is issued to the mobile folder, we are also automatically updating two new custom fields on the corresponding Work Request polygon to track the network share location of the PDF as well as the location where the PDF will be replicated to on each crew machine. Note the folders are specific to the job number:

These attribute values can then be used along with the Esri hyperlink tool to make opening the PDF folder very easy and intuitive. For the back office users, we configured the hyperlink tool to use the OfficeConstructionFolder. The field users, however, use ArcFM Viewer™ and we instead configured the Esri hyperlink tool to use the MobileConstructionFolder attribute.

When ArcFM™ Replication runs on the geodatabase, the above-mentioned attributes are replicated out to the field machines.

As a reminder, the design details are maintained in an Esri version which is NOT made available via ArcFM™ Replication BUT the work request polygon feature class is maintained in SDE.Default which is included in ArcFM™ Replication so the polygon and its attributes are made available to the mobile client machines.

We originally looked at including the synchronization of the PDFs to the client machines in ArcFM Replication but the replication process didn’t quite do what we needed with regard to file update tracking.

So we instead wrote a small console application that runs on the client machines twice a day (once in the morning, once in the evening) to handle the PDF synchronization from the back office to the field and vice versa.

At this point, both the updated work request polygon AND the PDFs are synched to the client machines. The crew machines can be configured to only subscribe to the types of jobs they may work. For example, water crews only get water PDFs, electric crews get electric and joint trench PDFs, and gas crews get gas and joint trench PDFs.

This allows ALL crews to get the PDFs for their assigned work and for each crew to have access to all active jobs in the system.

The crew users already utilize ArcFM Viewer™ for viewing their as-built infrastructure in the field today.

They are able to zoom to a location on the map using the search tools OR via GPS if they have GPS enabled on their field machine. In either case, the crew can locate their position on the map and is able to view the work request polygon within ArcFM Viewer™: 

The user can now use the Esri hyperlink tool within ArcFM Viewer™ to click on the polygon (they don’t really care about the underlying attributes, simply the means to an end) to load the local folder location containing the synchronized PDF drawings specific to the job. 

The user then simply double clicks on the PDF to view the contents. The one other key difference is that we’ve installed an application called PDF Annotator onto the field machines as the default application for PDFs.

So instead of opening the PDF as a read only file in Adobe Acrobat, the file is opened in PDF Annotator as an editable print that allows the user to add simple redlines to the print including text, free hand drawings, and basic shapes: 

When the redlines are complete, the user simply clicks the SAVE button in PDF Annotator. As expected, this overwrites the existing PDF print on the client machine. Our custom PDF synchronization application then detects the change in update date on the file and replicates it to a new file name the next time the user connects to the network.

The new filename includes the date and an index to ensure the file name is unique. It also maintains an un-edited copy of the design print in the same folder for posterity:  

The PDF synch process executes with full knowledge of the server folder and ensures that two crews updating the same redlines for the same job receive unique file names.

This allows for multiple crews, including joint trench scenarios, to work on the same job at the same time if needed. The updated redline PDFs (from one or more crews) are also transferred back to the server folder and subsequently made available to any other crews working the job and/or the back office staff immediately.

For example a gas crew working a joint trench job will be able to see any electric redlines as they are synchronized.

When the job is finally sent for as-built changes in the back office GIS, the back office users are able to use the hyperlink tool in ArcMap to open the server folder which now contains ALL field redline PDFs from one or more crews.

The GIS editors can then either have the redline PDF available on one screen while editing the GIS on a separate screen, OR they can add an image of the PDF to ArcMap and subsequently rubber sheet it directly into the map window. This allows you to view the as-built redline data as a layer directly in ArcMap to make your updates:
 

If this approach seems simple, you’re exactly right! BUT it meets all of the business requirements we documented at the top of this post. The simplicity of the implementation will ensure that the solution scales well to support many different crews working on the same jobs at the same point in time while allowing for a purely digital solution to moving the design prints back and forth from the field.

This is a great example of thinking outside the box to solve a business challenge and the result speaks for itself. We hope this will give you some ideas and encourage you to always think about a simple solution first – it increases the chance of success and greatly reduces support costs to boot!