Implementation
Intermountain Rural Electric Association
Project Completed
INDUSTRY: Electric
SERVICES: Implementation
PRODUCTS: SSP Delta
SSP Delta Implementation Helps IREA Resolve Design Errors
The Background
Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA) serves 150,000 customers along the Colorado front range. The non-profit co-op delivers reliable, low-cost electricity.
The Need
In the past, IREA’s three-person GIS team wanted to move to a GIS-based model, off AutoCAD, for editing designs within its versioned geodatabase. But moving off CAD would mean its 25 designers would edit the GIS directly.
“Prior to moving to Designer™ we had three GIS editors sitting side by side, telling each other exactly what they were working on,” IREA Director of GIS Duane Holt said. “Overnight we added 25 users. We had little control over what they were doing.”
The Challenge: Protecting IREA’s Production Data
To control the quality of edits designers posted, IREA needed a review tool and process for assuring quality of edits. Holt considered using Esri archiving for QA/QC. But Esri archiving allowed only retroactive edit review.
“Esri had just come out with archiving, and it didn’t suit our needs,” Holt said. “It didn’t give you the opportunity to catch problems before they were posted or to recreate problems that accidentally got posted.”
Holt had seen a presentation from SSP Innovations about SSP Delta at an event. SSP Delta is a one-click review tool for visualizing edits prior to posting.
“That was really helpful,” Holt said. “When we have 25 designers who don’t know GIS, a lot of mistakes can come in that we wouldn’t have caught. SSP Delta provided a built-in QC.”
IREA’s GIS team began using SSP Delta to visualize and review work submitted by designers.
The Solution: Out-of-the-Box Quality Control with SSP Delta
With SSP Delta, IREA’s GIS team could identify an error in one out of every eight versions submitted for posting.
In some cases, a designer might select an area larger than he or she meant to work on. If he or she performed a delete with these extra features selected, it could result in a deleted transformer or other assets.
“We’ve lost our territory lines before,” Holt said. “That takes a little time to put back in. With SSP Delta, that was easy to catch before posting.”
The Results: Proactive Edit QA/QC
“About one-eighth of the time, we catch a mistake before it gets recorded,” Holt said.
In addition, SSP Delta offers visual representation, which shows the context of an edit. When IREA’s township extensions got deleted, the GIS team knew immediately what had happened during the design work thanks to the visual context.
“We knew immediately this job can’t be posted,” Holt said. “It was just instantaneous, and we knew what the problem was. It was visual – just right there. You knew exactly what the designer was doing because you can see the edit visually.”
The last feature IREA uses from SSP Delta is its “undo edits out of order” function.
“Sometimes I don’t want to undo the last step,” Holt said. “I want to undo something that was three steps ago. With SSP Delta, I can go back to a job that was posted, pull out the elements I want, and restore any elements back into the GIS. That was probably number-one on our wish list.”
For more information on SSP Delta, check out its product page here.