From location-based awareness to storm and wildfire response.

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to today's webinar Strategies for Field Mobility from Location-based Awareness to Storm and Wildfire Response sponsored by IQGeo. I'm Lauren Calloway with TND World and I'll be moderating today. So to begin let me start off by explaining how you can participate into today's webinar. in today's presentation. First of all, if you have any technical difficulties during the session, please put your question in the questions window and our technical experts will help you out right away. We recommend disabling any pop-up blocking software or extensions in your browser as these can generally cause some issues with the webinar player itself. Additionally, we welcome your questions during today's event. We'll answer as many as possible during the Q&A session that will follow the main presentation, but please feel free to send your questions at any questions at any time and to do so, just type your questions into the question window on the side of your screen and hit the submit button. Also, please be aware that today's session is being recorded and will be available on the TND World website within the next week. You'll be notified by email when that archive is available. So with that, let's meet today's speakers. We're going to start off with Teo Posey, who is a Senior Solution Architect in the IT Utility Operations Division at Portland General Electric. And my apologies. We'll actually be starting off with Andy Gay, our other speaker, who is a Utilities Director at IQgeo. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and hand it over. Thank you, Lauren. Can you see the agenda slide, Lauren? Sure can. Okay, thank you. This is Andy Gay. Like Lauren said, I'm the Utilities Director at IQgeo. My main task today will be to basically get out of Teo's way and let him explain, you know, what he's done at Portland General Electric. But real quickly, the agenda, some of the things you'll hear today is obviously you'll hear a little bit about Portland General Electric, how they currently empower their field teams with the applications that you're going to see. Their reactions to some extreme weather events, both late last year and earlier this year. Some of the future use cases that they're considering and doing proof of concepts on at the moment. And then some summary and Q&A. We'll have plenty of time for questions and answers at the end. So in my role at IQgeo and prior to IQgeo, I've spent well over 35 years working with electric and gas utilities around the world. And there's some really unique things about PGE that I thought I'd share before we let Teo kick things off. Things that stand out to me are they're very heavily involved in the community. Very progressive in their thinking and the things they do, such as supporting renewables and electric vehicles. A lot of people are doing that now, but I would say that they're definitely early adopters and have a very heavy focus on it. They also strike me as extremely technology focused. I observe a very tight relationship between the IT and the business sides. And they both work together to roll out new tools. And again, that'll be apparent as Teo explains what they've done. I see a lot of responsiveness to changing business needs, investing in technology to streamline workflows, which is obviously very good for IQgeo. But I see them very progressive in that regard as well. And then you get a flavor today, nothing else, of dramatic climate changes that are occurring in that part of the world. And, you know, what they're doing to not just react to things that have happened in the past, but proactively expect these kinds of oddity, ongoing climate anomalies into the future. With that, I will turn it over to Teo Posey, our speaker for today. And please enjoy. Thank you for joining. Thank you, Andy. My name is Teo Posey. I'm a solution architect. I first started working at PG in 2004 and have been involved in quite a few projects here. Currently, I'm in the utility operations division, which is one of two divisions working with our business and, in particular, our field crews. To give you a little bit of background about PGE, we have about 900,000 customers. We have about 3,000 employees with 1,000 of those being in the field. As far as the size of our asset base, we have about 375,000 poles, transmission and distribution. And as far as conductor miles, we have about 30,000 distribution miles and 10,000 miles of transmission lines. We've been around for quite a while. We have some firsts. We were one of the first trading floors for trading energy on the West Coast and to our partners. We had one of the first radio networks for our field groups many years ago. And I believe we have the first long-distance transmission line many, many years ago that we built. We're doing a lot of very exciting stuff now. We're vertically integrated, right? So we have generation, transmission and distribution. We're very community-focused, very strong partners with our PUC and local communities and municipalities. We have a very green customer base. I believe we're in the top five, maybe even number one, percentage of customers that essentially invest and pay extra for renewable energy and support our renewable energy efforts. And we're constantly moving. We have a CIO that joined us a couple years ago who's very aggressive in exploring new technologies and delivering results to the business. As far as our GIS systems go, our primary on-premise GIS system is Esri. We're running version 10.6. We had been using Intergraph's older frame system for many, many years. And then we did a multi-phase major project, EAM projects, upgrading and replacing our work in asset management systems and also migrating from Intergraph frame to Esri. We're running ArcGIS server. We have some on-premise portal. We do quite a bit with ArcGIS online and Collector. I'll be talking more about Collector and our mobile apps coming up in a few minutes. And geo-event server, we have a little bit of that that we're working with. We're using the geometric network data model as our primary connectivity model for our assets in the GIS system. Schneider Electric's ArcFM is our design tool. And we have desktop and viewer tools. We also do some management of fiber and conduits in ArcFM. And then IQgeo is our most recent addition to our GIS footprint. We rolled that out last year or at the very end of 2019. And My World Field Viewer is the current primary app that we have rolled out, the initial version of this application. And that is synced to our on-premise Esri system. So while Esri is our system of record for the assets, a lot of the data is replicated so that it's available in IQgeo. So we have Windows and now iPad devices, and I'll be covering more about that rollout. And some of the functionality that we do out in the field that's not just viewing are data corrections, which I'll give a demo of. So before we had IQgeo, we had a number of technologies that we implemented for viewing GIS assets in the field. The Wave 1 project, which I was heavily involved in, 2011-2012. We did the initial Esri implementation, which was where we started the migration from frame. And we implemented IBM Maximo Spatial, which gives you a view of your assets in our enterprise asset management system. And then the NextWave project, which followed that on, we did the full Esri implementation. And we also implemented the Oracle's network management system as our outage management system to replace our older homegrown outage system. And along with that, of course, we retired the viewer that we had, the field view viewer that was part of the frame system and the OMS viewer. We had our own homegrown OMS viewer. And so a lot of the issues with viewers over the years have been, you know, that the user interfaces are clunky. You end up with a lot of tools and toolbar items. A lot of the tools are built by techies, kind of more for techies versus for, you know, field users that are not necessarily, you know, computer people or high-tech or GIS professionals. Some of the tools would have, you know, long layer lists to manage all the data that you could see in a pretty fine-grained detail. And I'll show you how we took a different approach when we implemented MyWorld. And just a quick aside, MyWorld is the initial name of the application and the company since has rebranded. So the product is now called IQgeo and I will probably refer it to using both terms through my slides. Arm Field Manager is our current mobile workforce application. It's an older technology. It runs under Windows only and it has very limited GIS capabilities. It essentially will have a, you know, you have the option for an ESRI base map but very little else to show. So it doesn't have very integrated functionality as far as viewing asset attributes or, you know, seeing where future work is on the map. So we went through a selection process. And what we did was we got some of the tools that we were considering and we put together this business user group, which we affectionately call the MAG-7, which stands for the Magnificent Seven. So this is a group of very engaged business users, field users, like special testers and line operations representatives. And so this team met regularly and they checked out all the tools, MyWorld and IQgeo being one of them. And it was pretty much a unanimous choice that IQgeo was the viewer that they preferred most. And so here are some of the quotes, you know, that came out of that review. Basically, you know, street view is like having night vision. So that's something that none of the other tools had was street view and nobody's showing that. I think I could master this in a day with very little training. That's always very important when you're dealing with change management and training in the field of people that, you know, normally are not spending their time on computers. They're, you know, repairing things and building new facilities. It feels more like a modern mapping application, right? So people are used to having maps on their devices, right, on their mobile devices. So, you know, we're used to Google Maps or Waze or, you know, those types of navigation applications that we use to get around these days. So IQgeo is much more like those types of applications than the traditional utilities map viewers that we've had. What I'm going to do now is go into a live demo. And one minute here while I switch over. I'll share my screen. And I'm going to show you the currently deployed version of the application. We've also been working with a newer version in some of our proof of concept projects that we're doing, which I will discuss later. Okay. So here is the main view that you get when you connect in the Windows version of this. As I mentioned, we also have this running on iPad. And I'll start with talking a little bit about the layers and base maps. So unlike a lot of tools which will use Esri Maps, we could use Esri Maps, but they have full support for Google Maps as, you know, a fundamental part of the application. And so this is a standard Google Street View. And then, of course, there's the hybrid view with the satellite imagery, which a lot of people like because you can see your actual facilities and poles. And then for the offline mode, there's an offline dark map. And this map is the one that they chose just for the cleanliness of it. And the business team was the one who decided this was the view that they wanted. They could have done an offline map that looks more like the Google Street View, but they chose this. So when they're disconnected, they do have a base map. This is the only map that you'll see disconnected, right, because the Google Maps do require connectivity. But you do have the offline map here. So I'm going to go back to a hybrid view here. And one of the things I want to talk about right now is just how powerful the search feature is. And it's a very modern sort of, you know, Google-like search that figures out what you're searching for as you're typing. And so I can go everywhere from typing a street address. And in this case, I'm pulling on my own address. And I've got both the parcels here because we have the parcels, PGE parcels in our land base. And then also I can go, you know, directly to a Google address here. And so zooming in here and then here's my house where I'm going to show a couple of features. What I'm going to do is I'm going to jump around a little bit from the slides. We also have screenshots in the slide deck that will be available for this presentation. But I want to show an example of a feature that I actually used with our business. where the transformer that you're seeing here, the T symbol in the white circle, was in the wrong location. And so they had it showing on my deck here. And so what I did was I essentially went in and I selected the transformer. And I opened up a field correction dialog, right? So this is one of the two types of information that we can capture out in the field where the people in the field can actually send data back through IQgeo back to the back office. And so in this case, I would, you know, put in some details here like, you know, need to move a transformer. And this would go back and it's not a safety issue. It's just in the wrong place on the map. I can add a picture here. I can take a picture directly from the camera. And then I can set the map location here where the transformer is. So say it was a little further down. It's a little bit difficult, but there's a red box there that you can see. And I'll hit save. And so now that field correction is there. And then in the back office, somebody can go in and say, oh, let me find details of that field correction. And then they can mark it as corrected. So this is one of the ways that we're improving our GIS data by collecting information in the field. Another related application are field notes here. And this would be where you're adding notes. For instance, you might say, okay, there's a gate here that has a lock, and you need to get a key from the owner in order to get to this transformer. So notes like that get collected in the field also. So the street view here is great. In this case, you can see the little street view icon right in the front of the house. And if I expand it, I can, you know, look around, and I can, you know, go down the street here. And we have underground, so you're not going to see much along the street here. But our street has actually got an older section where it transitions from underground to overhead. And I think down here you'll see a poll in just a second on the right. And there are polls down the side of the road here. And they really like that feature having that street view functionality. And a lot of viewers, including all of the viewers that we used to have, do not have that level of functionality. Another type of search you can do is you can just start typing in poll members by using the notation. So it knows, you know, that a letter followed by digits is likely to be a poll. And so it will search the poll feature, and then you can click and go directly to that record. So the searching functionality is superior. It's really helpful working with the technology. The last thing I want to show is the underground, right? So if I go to our, down by our headquarters, downtown Portland, you can see that we have all of the underground facilities showing here. And, you know, this gets pretty complex with underground vaults and all the connectivity. But all the detail is here. So the layers over here I just want to mention were chosen by the business. And one of the things that they did to make the application easier to use is grouping things logically. So they have primary here, and this is just two checkboxes. But it actually refers to a whole bunch of asset types that are related to the feeders, including transformers. And so if you turn these two things off, you're actually turning off multiple layers of assets, with the understanding that most people, when they're looking at that group of assets together and the conductivity between them, want to see it all or none. They don't want to have to go through there and click, you know, switches and reclosers and sectionalizers and, you know, feeders and secondaries, all of that. So the layer management and the design which the business, you know, participated in, it makes the application definitely, once again, easier to use than a lot of the other viewer technologies that you see. So I'm now going to switch back to the presentation. Give me one second, please. And back to the slide. So essentially the results of this have been great. Okay. You know, here's some quotes from the users. I've been here multiple decades and this thing is the best thing I've ever seen rolled out. Who designed this? You know, so the crews and the field personnel just have consistently positive feedback. And that's a good thing for us and something we're not always used to in IT when we roll out solutions. You know, we do our best, of course. But when you get that kind of information back from the field, it's good. And then it leads you to saying, okay, what else can we do with this solution, right? How can we leverage this more? Which is what I'm going to be covering next. So just for the numbers, it took us just a little over five months from design to deployment. So that's pretty fast for this type of project. The daily updates are via ETL from the ArcGIS data from our ESRI on-prem system. We've got end users involved in all the processes and a lot of visibility of the solution and how well it's gone. And then, you know, we work closely with the vendor and our teams to, you know, deal with issues that came up and, you know, map symbology and all of that to come up with a superior solution that has a really high acceptance rating. And it did just be a small project of the year for 2020, which was nice. So now what I'm going to do is spend a fair amount of time discussing the challenges that we faced in the last six months. And so I'm going to start out with the wildfires last year. And I'm sure you've heard a lot about this. We were national and probably even international news, the Northwest and the West Coast during these fires last September. And it was it was a horrendous experience to go through both as a somebody living here and as an employee of the utility dealing with the fallout from that. So Labor Day here. This is I was out with my daughter and her boyfriend. We were playing golf and the sky started turning brown and they decided they were going to bail and not finish around. But I took a picture and this was Labor Day when the fires, you know, were going on, but it wasn't affecting like those of us living in the city where we don't usually the fires don't reach in here, but we also don't get the effects of it that much. And so this was on Labor Day, September 7th. And there's this thing called the air quality index. That's a international standard for measuring air quality. And there's a number of measurements that they do. But there's this one measurement called PM 2.5. That's really basically telling you how bad your air is, like how bad your pollution is or how bad the air is. And the ranking goes from zero to 50 is good. The normal 51 to 100 is moderate air problems. 101 to 150 is unhealthy if you're sensitive to air problems like you have asthma. 151 to 200 is unhealthy. 200 to 300 is very unhealthy. And 300 plus is considered very hazardous. And so just to give you an idea here on this on the seventh, the air quality was still a 33, even as the sky was changing to that color. It changed to 56 on Tuesday back to 17 because we had some favorable winds. And it kind of cleared out a little bit on the ninth. The picture on the right was from my front porch on the 10th. And at that point, it bounced back up to 55 as the air quality. So that was on a Thursday. And then the air quality for the next week went 181, 239, 309, 419, 394, 274, 261, 233. So for eight days, the air quality was, you know, dangerous. And it was bad. It was bad. And then, of course, this was all caused by the fires and the fires just had a huge impact on the West Coast. Between the three primary West Coast states, we had over 10 million acres impacted over a million acres in Oregon, which is the most that we have on record. We had 4,000 structures destroyed on the West Coast, over 1,000 here in Oregon. The crews that we had to have involved in that effort were substantial. We had to have multiple utilities assisting us, what we call mutual aid crews and other contractors that we hired. So it was an all hands on deck, essentially dealing with this horrible wildfire season that we had never seen at that magnitude before. And so our response, in addition to dealing with the wildfires, is that we decided that it would be beneficial to roll out additional types of devices. Right. So the initial rollout of IQ Geo was on Windows. And so the Windows devices are ruggedized laptops in the trucks and the crews, you know, use those. They use it with a work management solution for work orders and the work and outage work that they do. And of course, my world for the mapping. But we decided that, you know, there would be a benefit to having iPads out there where they have more mobility, where they can take the device out in the field, you know, as they're walking around tracking stuff down. So we ordered 100 iPads and we distributed them to our Eagle crews, our two man crews, the special testers, supervisors and reliability technicians. So that was the initial rollout. So less than half of our field crew crews, but certainly a good start. And we had multiple IT and business teams working to do that. Right. So we had to take care of, you know, VPN security, device management, you know, the application deployment itself. And of course, you know, change management to start showing people how to use iPads. Right. And obviously, you know, if you're an iOS Apple phone user, you know, you know how to use an iPad pretty much. And or if you have your own iPad. So the training was, you know, relatively smooth and didn't cause a lot of change management issues. So the initial applications are Microsoft Office. And, you know, that's primarily used for, you know, Outlook and Teams, although, of course, you can use SharePoint and other applications. And then IQ Geo, my world as the GIS viewer. So we also ordered 15 iPads for standby. Right. Because we said, oh, it would be good to have some iPads ready if we have mutual aid crews come in for an event. And so obviously, when you have mutual aid crews come in, they're not PG employees. They're not on our network. They don't have accounts. So we set up some special temporary crew IDs on those iPads for those devices. So this was in between, you know, this is after the wildfires that we started this rollout. But these devices were all rolled out by late November. So then after having the worst wildfires in our history and recorded history, we went into what we call storm season, which is where we can have winter storms. And our territory in the northwest, we typically don't get a lot of, you know, heavy weather at the lower elevations. But every year or two, we will get a storm, in particular an ice storm. Right. So it tends to freeze the nature of the weather cycle here. It's not just, you know, dry, fluffy snow that accumulates. And so when we have these storms and the winds associated with them, we can end up with, you know, similar situations to the wildfires where we have, you know, large crews doing, you know, massive restoration. So in February, right before Valentine's Day, we had a storm hit us that less than six months after the biggest wildfire season that we ever had, we had the largest storm that we had seen in 70 years. And this was a long running multi-phase storm that started on the 11th of February and resulted in multiple cycles of customers having the same customer having outages. Right. So even though we might have had a total of, you know, 40 percent of our customer base impacted, the number of outages is, you know, more than four or five hundred thousand. And so this shows some of the highlights and the peaks of how many customers were out and the restoration that went on over a, you know, 10, 12 day period. So just to show you some of the photos that were taken, you know, just the damage and the crews that were out there working on them, just extensive, you know, long hours and effort to do this. And as far as by the numbers, as I mentioned, you know, 759,000 customers restored, many more than once, 256 feeders restored, 20 substations, 400 miles of transmission line. We had over 12,000 wire downs. And then, you know, we had sections of road that were closed for various reasons. Also, some of it related to the utility work that was going on and other damage. As far as the amount of equipment that was replaced during that storm and its aftermath, you can see the numbers there, you know, 4,000 cross arms, over 1,000 poles, over 200 miles of cable, over 1,000 transformers, et cetera. So just, you know, amazing amount of effort and equipment and materials management to make this all happen. To show it to you on the map, just to show you the extent of it, this is our service territory and the county boundaries. And this shows you the impacted transmission lines in color, right, and then the dark ones that were not impacted. So some significant major transmission line damage. And then the number of substations that were impacted. So the ones in orange are ones that had significant damage that we had to repair. And the other ones, so, you know, a large percentage of our substations were impacted. And then the customer outage area, very large portion of our service territory. As far as the resources that were deployed to assist in this effort, here is the counts. Here are the counts. We had 988 line crews, you know, made up of our own crews, 44 crews from surrounding states. Contract crews, first responders, crew leads, you know, people that essentially are often not normally field personnel, but they were like our design project managers that do, you know, construction designs out in the field. They went out and assisted. A large number of the vegetation crews were used, of course, because a lot of the work that needed to be done was vegetation cleanup, tree removals, and that type of activity. We had lots of wire down patrols, flaggers, you know, our customer service department was just working 24 by 7 answering calls and helping our customers through all of this. And, of course, a lot of our internal IT support teams. And, you know, both the wildfires and the storms, the issue is our employees are also impacted, right? So you've got people who, you know, are coming in to go work out in the field and then they go home to no power. So it makes for a tough situation, but we got through it. And the iPads helped, right? Having IQ Geo and the iPads out there was significant. In addition to the 15 iPads that we had for mutual aid crews, we procured 100 more very quickly, like in the first two days, and had somebody just going out to the line centers and distributing them and getting them to the mutual aid crews. And so, you know, some of the comments we got from the crews out there, you know, this was one of the best things to come out. It's bucket trucks, you know, an awesome tool, especially when trying to run down a line in the middle of the night. So very positive feedback and strong demand from the field. And so that's led us to a decision to outfit most of our field crews with iPads sooner rather than later. So that's in process now. One thing I did want to mention I didn't show related to this quote about, you know, trying out to run out of line. One of the things about IQ Geo and the way we have it implemented here is that it does understand our connectivity model. And so I'll just jump back quickly to a screenshot of a slide for the tracing that's done. But you have the ability essentially to pick an asset or a conductor and say, okay, where does this go? And you can either go upstream or downstream or both, or you can just go back to the, you know, nearest protective device. But this is super helpful, especially for people that don't know our service territory when they're out in the field and they need to trace a feeder or, you know, see, you know, which homes are feeding off a transformer, that type of thing. So all of that can be traced in real time out in the field. And so that's a really nice feature. So what I'd like to do now is talk a little bit about what we're doing next for leveraging this great technology out in the field. And so, you know, PG is doing a lot of grid modernization. Like a lot of utilities these days, you know, we have stuff that we have to modernize just to meet regulatory requirements and keep the network working well. But we also have a lot of stuff that's going on with, you know, automated distribution management, our ADMS system that we're implementing that essentially just makes for a smarter grid. You know, and that's a requirement for us to really leverage some of the newer technologies. And, you know, like having EV chargers that, you know, feed data back into the grid and, you know, more distributed generation, generation, including customer generation of electricity and managing that well and balancing out the load. So there's a lot of stuff going on. A lot of the stuff we're doing in operations is about simplification and mobility, right? So we're trying to grow our mobile solutions and simplify the business processes, you know, enable the field workers to do their job more efficiently and safely. And so IQgeo is definitely one of those tools that has now become a key technology that we're going to grow to make that happen. And so what we started last year at the end of last year was some proof of concept projects, POCs, in the area of work management, inspections, and lightweight design. And so for inspections, we have a program called Fitness, which is our pole inspection program. And essentially it's a 10-year cycle where every 10 years, one-tenth of our poles are inspected. And the way that that's done is using map grids, right? And so they will choose a tenth of the map grids in our area and say the poles within those grids are going to be inspected. And so this is our utility asset management department. And the way that they do it today is they're using Esri ArcGIS Online and Esri Collector Mobile Application. And so they will take our Esri pole information from our on-prem ArcGIS database, geo-database, and then they will upload it to ArcGIS Online. And then they have iPads that the crews and contract crews use to collect information, pole inspection information. And this pole inspection information is both, you know, the condition of the pole, but also a lot of this has to do with our joint use program where we have third-party utilities and comp companies renting space on our poles, right? And so we have to inspect those to make sure that they're up to code and that there are no violations. So all of this is tied into this inspection thing. And so we decided instead of using Collector and ArcGIS Online, what if we did it within this new IQgeo tool that the field really likes? And so we built forms that essentially capture all of the same data that they collect today in our collector, but in IQgeo. And so we worked very closely with IQgeo on, you know, making this form work well. You can see here this is an inspection summary. So some of this data comes from the data that gets loaded from the map grid, you know, of which poles are going to be inspected. And then the inspection status, the inspector will go out and, you know, find the ones that are in the grid that they're working that are marked as inspection pending and then mark them as complete. And then we have various tabs on the form here that are used to collect the information regarding the poles. So here, inspection details, you've got, you know, information about the pole, the insulators, the condition of them, you know, whether there's avian, like bird nests on the pole, et cetera. And so all of this information that they were collecting now, we have the ability to collect it or, you know, we will have the ability to collect it in IQgeo. QC is also done here. And then for related data, there's, we can attach photos. So there will be photos attached to the inspections. So what I want to talk about next is a second POC that we did that came directly out of the storm efforts this February, right? So even as we were going into the storm on February 11th, I think, we met with the head of T&D field operations. And he said, yeah, we're rolling out a PDF form in order to collect information. And we're going to send out our design project managers into the field to, you know, assign them each a feeder and have them go and assess this damage as the storm is happening and after the thing. So they created a PDF form with PDF fill capabilities and dropdowns so it could be done on a laptop and then, you know, emails back to somebody to collect the information. And so we said, you know, this just seems like another perfect application to do within IQgeo on the iPads. That's right, why have a PDF form? Why not have something out in the field that, you know, knows where the outages are and lets you collect this information efficiently and get it back in real time to the office and to a dashboard so people can use this information for repair dispatch and for, you know, collecting the materials, getting them ready in the stock rooms for doing the repair. So I started working with that form and the latest version of IQgeo here and I created a damage assessment feature. And what I did is I imported, what you're seeing here is I imported the outage data for the first three days of the storm. So this is a large number of the outages that had been reported. And on the left, you can see the layers where you can select whether you want to see new outages that haven't been had assessment done or you can complete the inspections and then a review process back in the back office to review the inspections. And so the forms themselves here is the data that would come from OMS, right, once we get an integration built, right? As I mentioned, this is a proof of concept. It was not a full integration and ready for production project. But this information here would be fed from our outage system. So the damage assessment would start with the outage, the way it gets sent out to the field today in our work management tool. And it would have the associated information about the feeder, the identified device, the estimated number of customers out. And then they would go into the assessment itself and record all the information. Essentially, that's on that form, but recorded in IQgeo, you know, on their iPad. And that would include photos, you know, multiple photos that then would be tied directly to the assessment and to the outage itself. And so here's an example of, you know, picking or having the ability to collect information about the equipment that's needed and the resources that are needed for the restoration. And so this information then, as I mentioned, goes back to repair dispatch and then back to the storerooms for getting those materials ready. And as you saw by the amount of materials we had to process, it would have been helpful to have this tool, you know, working in real time, getting that data back as we were doing the restoration. The third POC that we did over the last few months was regarding our design tools and how we do designs out in the field. And the current design tool that we use primarily is, I mean, we use AutoCAD for some stuff, but our primary graphical design tool is Schneider's Arc FM. And that's a, you know, a heavyweight client app that runs under Windows. And our design process, you know, is essentially to send design project managers out in the field and then they'll bring back, you know, napkin drawings or a sketch or something to provide details on the drawing to our GIS department. And then our GIS department takes their designs and then they draw it in Schneider in Arc FM. And then those designs then get turned into PDFs and stuff that get shared with the customers. So what we just decided to do was to pursue working with IQgeo on a proof of concept to take their network manager product, which is used a lot in the communication, com companies for, you know, fiber and that type of design. And we decided to do a POC of a lightweight design tool that could be done in the field. And in the lower right here, you see a picture that was done from a skit that we did in IT a little over a year ago. And that's my manager on the left, Brian Clark, and one of his managers, Alicia Cook, who owns our EAM systems. And what they did is, you know, they'd come in with a laptop and a bunch of sketches and he drops the laptop. It's a ruggedized laptop and says, you know, how clumsy is this? And then, you know, fast forward to the future and it's like, gee, wouldn't it be nice if we could go out with an iPad and sit down and talk to the customer, ask them what they want, draw a little sketch, show it to them and have them say, okay. And then you turn that into a PDF and get them the estimate and the quote, you know, a couple hours later, much faster than our current turnaround time for this type of work. And so we did that POC and it went really well. And so as did all of these POCs. And so basically right now we're at a point where we're working with IQgeo on our short-term and long-term plan to take these POCs and turn them into reality and into, you know, applications that we're going to roll out into the field. And so we're very excited. IQgeo has been a great partner. They're great to work with, great people. And very interested in our success. And with that, I will turn it back to Andy. Thanks, Tao. That was a great presentation. A couple of things jumped out at me as I'm watching it. One is it's obvious that Tao has a great deal of experience. He's been working with utilities for four years at least. Sorry, Tao, I didn't mean to age you, but that depth of experience really stands out. The other thing I'd say is that it's nice to have somebody who's steeped in the IT details and the technology as well as the business acumen and the subject matter expertise to pull off these kind of projects. And the other thing is that Tao and his team, a lot of this work, an experimentation they did on their own. And we provided phone support and some critical, I think, help at certain times. But a lot of this, you know, they just ran with it and developed some productive productivity tools on their own, which I think is really cool. So, to summarize, you can see they've got a landscape that promotes rapid implementation experimentation. They've had kind of a lesson learned that you probably all learned at some point, but the more that you can get frontline workers embedded in helping to drive a project team, you know, the more successful it will be. I think Tao mentioned, you know, the positive outcomes and the experience the field users had as well as the impact on the business case. A lot of new technologies, a lot of new tools. As Tao said, you know, sometimes there are techies building for techies. But the business case is invalid until the people that are supposed to use it are out doing their jobs and performing their, you know, their day-to-day duties with it as a tool, just like anything else they might carry. I think it's interesting how quickly that you've been able to do something innovative as a result of these weather events and that, you know, the past year and for the future, because, you know, as we were talking not too long ago, that storm season is now an annual event. And all year long, you go from one kind of natural emergency to another and back. So, I think that's very significant and probably, you know, a changing scenario for a lot of utilities in North America. With that, Laura and I will turn it back over to questions. And don't be shy. We'd love to hear from you. Thank you. Yeah, thanks, Annie. And Tao, yeah, I just want to echo what a great presentation. I was also really impressed with the team's ingenuity and how quickly you guys were able to roll out some of these solutions. So, with that, I will go ahead and jump into some of our audience questions. So, the first one, how long did it take to build the database in IQgeo? I'll do my best to answer that. I was not involved in the initial implementation. It was, I was transitioning from consulting back to PGE. I left for a few years and did a couple big projects. Interestingly enough, including, I was working alongside the team that implemented IQgeo at Duke Energy in 2014 through 2017. But the whole project here from design to production was five months. So, when you say build the database, I believe, you know, the building of the database, like the design of the features and the layers, and then building the ETL to replicate that data from Esri to IQgeo was, you know, less than six months start to finish. I can't tell you how long the database itself took, whether it was two or three months, but certainly within that timeframe. Great. So, the next question, are the data behind the tracing function entirely resident in the IQgeo database at runtime? So, when a user runs a trace, if so, can you briefly describe how this works and how data from Esri are sent and consumed in IQgeo? Right. So, let me start with the second part first, if that's okay, which is the thing about Esri, the Esri data, right? So, the Esri data is replicated using an ETL process nightly from our on-premise GIS system, the system of record Esri, to the IQgeo database. And then we generate extracts that are delta extracts, right? So, only the changes go down to the field, and people do a quick sync to get their changes. And, yeah, if somebody goes on vacation for a week or two and their device has been off, they're going to get, you know, up to 14 of these packets of data changes. But we have not had performance issues or, you know, issues with the sync times, like I've experienced with other tools, other GIS-based tools that have offline capabilities in the past. With regards to the tracing, I believe it's fully self-contained in the offline database. I don't know. Can you confirm that, Andy? I'm pretty sure, but I don't want to overstep my understanding of that piece of it. I haven't tried it offline, but I'm pretty sure. Yeah, it all works offline. Yeah. So, yeah, the tracing functionality is great, and it's pretty fast. I mean, I did a trace, an upstream trace, you know, like took two to three seconds, and then I did a downstream trace from a feeder that, you know, fed into like five neighborhoods, and it took maybe 20 seconds, but then it traced everything, you know, 200-plus objects. It's pretty great, good stuff. Very cool. Okay, next question from the audience. Esri has many out-of-the-box apps, mobile, desktop, et cetera. What did IQTO have that these apps did not for PG&E or PGE? I'm sorry. So, I mean, I want to focus on the mobile apps, right, not the desktop app, right, because the main reason we're using IQTO is because of its user experience and the mobile experience. As I mentioned, we're looking into lightweight design and potentially using it as a design tool, but we're still using our, you know, GIS system of record, Esri, and the desktop tools for editing that. So, but on the mobile side of things, the function, you know, some of the features I showed you were things that we don't see in the tools that we would normally use from Esri, right? So, Esri collector or survey one, two, three, I don't think they can do network tracing, right? And talking to the people that work on our collector forms, there's limited capabilities for extending the forms with customizations or validations or integrating with other systems the way that we can with IQTO. And, you know, I know Esri is pushing their mobile platform ahead, but, you know, we gave the MAG7, the collector is one of the tools they could try out and decide if they wanted to use it. And they decided they liked IQTO much better. And so for us, that's the bottom line, that the field likes the tool better. You know, and I'm sure the network tracing is a big piece of that. The Google Maps and the Street Map, the Street View integration, I don't see that in very many mobile tools. You know, I see a lot of mobile tools that are built on the Esri platform and the Esri runtime engine. And the Esri runtime engine, if you've ever had to work with it and work with Esri replicas and the complexities of their replication mechanism, it's not as robust as I would like, even after they've had it out for years, right? And I've done Esri implementations, you know, with Esri replication offline capabilities. And it was a lot of work. And the performance that we see in the IQTO tools and, you know, the Postgres database that's behind IQTO with post-GIS is really high performance and better performance characteristics than I've seen in most GIS systems. Okay, thanks, Tao. Okay, on to the next question. Can IQTO be launched by passing parameters? And some of our MWMS jobs have facility information in the work order. We would like to launch the app with data from a work order. Yes, absolutely. And you can do it in both directions, right? So for the initial implementation, we have the Maximo work orders. We use Maximo as our work management system. We have Maximo work orders linked to from the work orders that show up on the IQTO map. And if you click on it, it will launch it into Maximo with that work order selected. We haven't done the other way yet, but they support what are called deep links, right, which are complex URLs with parameters that you can use to launch a native app, including iOS or Android, and you can pass it either an address or an XY location or a record identifier for a work order to go directly to that record. And, Lauren, the only thing I would add to that is we've done that with – we have a number of partners on the EAM side that we've done, you know, the equivalent of what Tao just described with Maximo. Wonderful. Thanks so much. Okay. Next question. In terms of responding to large-scale recovery options, e.g. hurricanes, fires, et cetera, is the app able to load in incoming workers' qualifications, such as distribution, transmission, substation, et cetera, in order to put them to work in the right areas? I would not use IQgeo for that in our current solution. I mean, when you talk about the qualifications, the skills, the crafts, in my mind, that's all about work management, right, and dispatching and scheduling. IQgeo does have a workflow manager product that's what I would call lightweight work management, depending on the application that you're doing. But for us, for our crews and managing our crews, you know, we have a full scheduling system with schedule optimization and, you know, understanding the different types of crews and skills and who can do what types of work. So we're not using IQgeo for that right now. Okay. Great. Next question. What sort of VPN are you using with your iPads? Is it configured in the network settings or more of a container-based solution, such as an app? Can you share some pros and cons of the one that you are using? Sure. I'll just give you a little background about that. The VPN that we're using right now on the iPads is F5, F5's front end. And so that works really well. It's tied into our multi-factor authentication. We are – so – and we have an MDM, mobile device management system, Microsoft Intune, that we're using to manage the PGE-owned iPads. We are working very closely with IQgeo on a solution that will let us wrap the application or have the application hooked in directly to our multi-factor authentication and with on-device encryption so that it meets our security standards so that we can run on BYOD devices, right? We're very interested in both employees and contractors and mutual aid crews being able to run it on their own devices, not just PGE-supplied iPads. So we're actively working on that. Great. And I know you've touched on this a little bit more, but maybe you can talk more in detail. How are you approaching the issue of integrations with other systems? Yes. So part of the POC work that we did is to integrate IQgeo more tightly with some of the systems that are either providing or consuming the data, right? So one of the things that we're doing at PGE is we are overhauling our integration architecture from some older Java-based integration engines to AWS Amazon technologies, right? So we're rewriting the bulk of our real-time integrations to our work management system using AWS S3 buckets and step functions and Lambda functions and serverless components. And so as part of that, we did POCs with Python scripting, and we worked with IQgeo to get some event -driven output so that we got real-time data. So as part of the POCs, for instance, I have it so that I can go into the outage system and create an outage, and within seconds, it shows up on the map in IQgeo, and likewise, if you go in and add safety comments or crew comments, you can update back to the outage system in the same time period, seconds, from when they do the update and do the sync. And so we're integrating to our outage system. Not in production yet, but we're looking at it. And then, of course, our work management system, primary work management system, Maximo, we're looking at IQgeo potentially being a front end to that instead of our current older Windows-only mobile solution. All right. Well, wonderful. Thank you so much, Keo and Andy. And, of course, thank you so much to our sponsor, IQgeo. I'm afraid we've run out of time for today. For those questions we didn't have time to answer, we'll be getting back to you via email. And with that, that concludes our presentation. We hope everyone in the audience was able to gain some valuable insights today. I'm sure they did. And that you all have a great and productive remainder of the day.