Improve high value asset inspections.

This session was originally presented at IQGeo's 2021 virtual meetup. The session is headlined by guest speaker Rich Swain, Senior Developer at Counties Energy. In this short video, Rich shares how IQGeo products, tools and features are used at Counties Energy and the value it brings to his business. Rich Swain, So yeah, I'm Rich Swain and I work for Counties Energy. I'm the Senior Geospatial Developer Integrator, really with sort of a background small world developer. So 25 years, but really I look after all the geospatial side, including best practice, steering committee stuff, architecture. And yeah, so I'm just going to talk a little about one of our areas we've used IQGeo, or using it right now at the moment for high-quality, high-volume inspections. So I'll just take you through a little quick Counties Energy at a glance. I'll talk just a quick what's the problem we have with high-volume inspections, proposed solution, and basically managing some of the inspection questions, which we found a bit tricky. And that's one of the reasons why we went with IQGeo for this. Dynamic inspection questions, and then a demo and next steps. So as Mandy said, we're in New Zealand, beautiful Southern Hemisphere. And this is Counties Energy at a little sort of snap. So you can see on the left map here, there's only 5 million people in New Zealand. And the way they have their electricity distribution, they're all segmented. There's almost like 70 different sort of like areas. But the main area we look after is in the South Auckland. So you can see on the right, sort of our network coverage here. And this is a really large growing area of New Zealand. So we basically span that Southern Auckland and Northern Waikana regions. Established in 1924, we've got 185 staff. So we're not huge, you know, 46,000 client connections, you know, 350 million asset base. But we have huge growth. And it's one of those tricky things is whether you're, whether you've got a million customers, or whether you've got, you know, 50,000 customers, you have the same problems as an electric distribution company, is it's, which is always quite tricky when you're trying to, you know, digitize everything and stuff like this. Yeah, so massive growth in the next five years. So I'll talk now, what's the problem that we have, and we're going to talk about today, so high volume asset inspections. What I mean when I say high volume is really pole and pillar for us, like meters, ICPs, things like that. But it's the pole and pillar was one of our primary ones. And what they do right now, we also have, we have small wood for our GIS system, but it's the pole and pillar inspections are primarily done by subcontractors. And they basically printed out these massive A3 plots, incorporated PDF plots, you know, these huge numbers of sheets, you know, and basically manage it. This is the sort of preventative maintenance team, they manage it in Excel files, and they can't really track it properly either. So they might give someone one of these massive, you know, 20, you know, one circuit might have 20, 30, you know, A3, you know, things on it showing where the actual poles are, they don't give them any digital information about it, they can't track when it's finished. So it's a bit, not an ideal system. So all of our assets are mastered in the GIS. So we use small electric office. So we have got Maximo recently, as about a year and a half ago, we started a project on that, and that's used ongoing for preventative maintenance. But I guess that system is pretty immature right now, the results will be stored there. That's one of the mandates for future. But it's pretty, like I say, new system, immature, as far as a company implementations go. Now, the mobile app that we have through one of our partners here is, you know, it's just not intuitive for high volume inspections as well. So they started doing the substation and transformer inspections with it, but the routing when you get to like poles and things like this, when you've got 1,000, 2,000 poles of the circuit, it just doesn't make sense. It doesn't work for them. Then they were used to using and seeing more of IQ Geo and how we kind of started deploying that more throughout the field and even in, you know, just web as well. So we basically went and looked at that survey inspection module, which we actually purchased. We put IQ Geo in about a year ago, and we had the plan of going this direction. But the survey inspection module kind of out of the box is focused on gas, gas leak survey, bread crumbing, which is really good, but it didn't really fit as well for us in the electric distribution side. It was sort of had a simple survey item that would, you walk past it would auto survey or you could change it there. But we need lots of questions. We need condition information about the assets and, you know, true inspection information. So otherwise the actual rest of it was great. So we just needed to make some tweaks. So that's where we came up with the proposed solution. So was basically say, we'll use the survey inspection module, but we'll, we'll make some custom changes. And we already use IQ Geo in the field already for simple data corrections. So people were getting quite impressed, you know, with how that works and the flow of it and the look and feel. So as I say, enhance that inspection survey one, you can see on the right here, the sorts of things we need to ask. And I'll show that a bit more in the demo. But it's, you know, questions about the pole, cross arm insulator. It needs to be upgradable too. So even though we're enhancing the survey inspection, we were on 6.1 now, you know, with 6.2, we want to just go and flip straight over to it. We don't want to have tons of custom code that's not upgradable. So that was one of our key requirements. And it also had to be really easily configurable, you know, to go and add new asset types, inspections, questions, things like that. So IQ Geo are engaged to help you some of that development. We do sort of all the management of the platform internally here, but the JavaScript development and that we sort of engage IQ Geo to do. So that was a great team there. We had Guru working with us, one of the sort of lead developers there at IQ Geo. And that went really well. So one thing we did talk about was where do you manage inspection questions? So, you know, people have, you know, Maximo, you know, that's actually what it's meant to be for, you know, create your questions there, store it all. That will be the final location for it, but it's not very intuitive for us right now. And it's a bit immature. It's, as I say, not ready as well. And we can't wait for it, but that will be the future master database. So what we're doing is we're saying, well, initially we're going to go and, you know, create and manage all those questions inside of IQ Geo. It's pretty straightforward with the features to go and do that, but we'll implement that way. You know, it's manual. It's easy to extend though. If someone wants a new, a new inspection one, it's just a quick five minutes to go and add that. And then, you know, you extract it out, you know, to the field and it's almost instantaneous, which is the beauty of IQ Geo. But that was where we were going to do. We're also saying in the future, Maximo will duplicate those inspection questions. At the moment it's in sort of manual that, you know, sort of testing that. It may be automatic in the future and that we may even possibly master some of those questions from Maximo and then just pull them through to IQ Geo. But as I say, until Maximo's for our company is matured, we're going to go with IQ Geo being the master of managing all of this. And we also have the reports we're creating to read from IQ Geo just to show the results a bit more and better. But eventually inspection results will flow from IQ Geo to Maximo, so post-res to SQL. One thing we did need as well. So when I was saying we need inspection questions, you've obviously all seen IQ Geo features with questions or fields. But we need, you know, if I end up having here, say, you know, cross on rotten at the top here, like someone in the field is going to go and say, yes, it's rotten. Well, we need things to dynamically, you know, pop up and give extra information, especially likelihood of failure. So these are our critical things which will auto generate defects in the back, in the back end as well. So these will have scores with them that will factor in in terms of like criticality and flow downstream. So that was quite a key one to say, well, when we put these in place, we need these dynamic pop ups. So that's worked really well. It's basically say, you know, you change it back, it disappears. It just makes it nice, nice for the user. So I'll do a quick demo for you here now, just kind of a quick workflow of what we've got. So this is just our dev system. This is our sort of our stock standard, like, you know, and this is actually a web based one, obviously, but it's very similar on a tablet. So for all your purposes here, I'll just show you on here. But in IQGEA for us, we've got a number of different applications. But then all the survey ones and the new ones we've just been working with, these are kind of the out of the box survey inspection ones. And the survey office, what would happen is someone would be in the office, they would come say, you know, to an area here. This is our network and all our circuits. And they might come in here and be managing it. And I'll just come into one of our smaller circuits. So church corner here. And what they can do is they can come in and say, we're going to go and create a new one. So I'll just do a church test. So this is, you know, shows what we're actually going to look at doing, too, is we're automating this for all the main circuits. But this just shows you how easy it is to go and do it. So if I create an order that goes with it. Church order and the orders basically mean you could set these to be. You know, basically just recur on sort of every six months and the order will auto create. I pick up all the latest assets. So I'm going to pick it here within, say, a selected polygon. So that'll be fine here. Got my polygon selected. I'm just going to say for mine, I'm going to pick all my statuses, make sure they're all existing for our polls. And then you use, like I say, you can go and do other additional filtering. For us here, we can do recurrence, which would mean it would automatically recur every six months or year, whatever that needed to be. So I'm going to go ahead and create that survey. And this will just go and scan for the polls inside of there and it'll go and create custom objects. So we've used the normal. So you can see this is going to create this 218 polls in that ticket circuit. And it's created this survey order here. Now, the normal surveyable items, we actually, the extension we've done to this is it. And I'll show you in a second is actually it creates a new survey poll feature as well. Everything. Now, what I will do here just so I can demo that, I'll just go and assign that to the crew, which will be me for this particular one. And this would be very easy to go and have people assign and manage this. And then I'll do a demo of the field application now. So this would be the person on their iPad. Coming in here. So if I clicked on that church order. Press OK, that takes them directly to you and shows them on the screen where all of those are like, obviously, if you were on the tablet in the field, you get taken directly to your location. So let's imagine where we're down here and it takes me and it sits me right next to here. Now, the whole goal of this was people in the field to easily say that's what you've got to work on. You know, we we haven't built a routing for them because we're we're trusting based on this. They can do that. They can look at the area and they can make sure how many you're working out there, their flow. So. As I say, I should just say in the order status here, this will show them the progress they're doing, you know, how much they've got left to do things like that. But if we go and select on one on the screen, the normal workflow here will be they will come in here and they'll edit this. And as you can see, they've got a tab for poll questions, cross on questions, insulator questions. And we're actually adding conductor questions as well, because normally when I do inspections, they're going to go to the poll. And that's the key thing for the overhead lines is it's everything, including the conductors. And then they might come here and say, yeah, I've got a possum guard installed. All these questions were in the project. These are all mandatory. I'll just show you I've made it more flexible just for the demo here. Just to go and be obviously it's going to force you to do certain sub ones that drop down. Now, what we can do here is we can go and see, I've got one here now that's partially surveyed. So we have the ability to allow that case. You know, someone's working through a particularly long survey. And the other thing they could do, if I submit it, that will actually do the full submit of that survey. Now to submit it, they're going to have to fill out all the answers to all the questions. They're not going to be able to do it. And then that would essentially be them done. So they say it's quite nice with that workflow of for a person in the field. You know, this is a really nice way for them to go ahead and do it. And we're getting good feedback right now from the preventative and maintenance team. The nice last step of this would be the survey dashboard. So like I said earlier, you. We've we've customized it, but we're trying to use all the core tools. So, again, the survey dashboard here allows you to go and see at a snapshot. You know, how how am I how am I basically my orders and my poll inspections tracking? These are the outstanding ones in this test system I'm just working right now. You know, how many assets are remaining? How many assets have been done? What's my percentage done? So the nice thing is every time if someone's in the field, as soon as they go and submit those, which is all the time by the day, you get a really easy snapshot of what's happening. You know, people on track. Are they not on track? Are they behind? You know, more and more of our stuff is getting regulatory based, not as much as a gas would be. But we're definitely moving that way in New Zealand. So we have to manage these much, much better. And this this is a great way of actually allowing them to come in and have a look at what's being surveyed. Are there any issues? Why are all these partially surveyed? And they can go and query that data as well. So that essentially is the demo portion there. And I should say, like I said, is we've all these objects you see on the screen, these are actually a custom object. That's the enhancement we've made with IQgeo to sort of have like a survey poll. But we have survey pillars, survey meters, objects in there, too. And it depends what type of survey you pick. And then those will be the, you know, just a table, the system post-rests that we integrate back into Maximo and BI reports, things like that. So the next steps for us, what we're doing, we're actually in an interesting, this is, I guess, COVID is a whole other presentation for people to do at some point of how it impacts us all. But it's the we're in a lockdown right now in Auckland. Excuse me. So we've been there 62 days for a pretty severe lockdown due to COVID. And probably we're weeks away inside. I'm lucky I don't live. I live in Wellington, further down south. I just work remotely from here for counties as a permanent employer. But it's so I'm out walking around, but they're all locked down. So that's had a bit of a delay on our rollout of this. Soon as we get back in the office in the coming weeks, we'll be pushing that out. We also have new iPads we're rolling out with this moving from Android to iPads. Another thing we're just moving to AWS migration of geospatial platforms. So that's just kicking off now. So we'll be making changes for that tool linked to their Maximo integration, though, for all of these. We were having a support provider change for that. But the nice nice thing is about IQ Geo. It can stand on its own two feet, too, where we're not going to delay and we can delay preventative maintenance condition management. These are all critical things. So we'll integrate that when we can. And then also automation, like I said, so new inspection questions, data flows between systems, BI reports. We're just still working on that automation there. And then extending inspections to other assets. So even though this was initially kicked off to be, hey, you know, Maximo doesn't look very good. We don't want to do our high volume inspections on it. Now they see this. They're actually OK. Maybe we just go and move all of our inspections to it. Let's just do our transformer substation and just get everything on there. So I think that's the way we're more than likely to go. So thank you very much. That's me over and I'll pass back to the team.