So where exactly are my assets?

An Industry Insight by Roland Cunningham, Rolta UK

“In this highly competitive world where efficiency and effectiveness affect the bottom line, an accurate asset management system is an essential business tool”
-Roland Cunningham, Rolta UK

Utility and telecommunication businesses provide the infrastructure fabric for maintaining our way of life. The pipes and cables that criss-cross Europe give us heat, light, water, the ability to talk and see others, and take away our waste. Most of this infrastructure has been buried for decades and recording its accurate location has not always been a priority. Customer satisfaction, health and safety, efficiency, effectiveness, legislation and competition have all now become board room concerns and one way to attack them is to know what you have, what’s its condition and where it is – an accurate location-based asset management system that supports business intelligence.

Most organisations have installed geographic information systems (GIS) that perform some departmental functions. GIS is now entering the ‘open standards and service-oriented-architecture (SOA) of mainstream IT’, but many businesses have yet to embrace GIS as their enterprise asset management system, even though interoperability can be achieved through geo-referencing their data.

The UK base level for location is the Ordnance Survey (OS) map. In the 1990s, discrepancies between digital maps and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) co-ordinates became apparent. The OS therefore embarked on a Positional Accuracy Improvement (PAI) programme – completed March 2006. Base map features were shifted into new GPS-based positions – up to 28m in rural areas, but varying distance and direction. Organisations that had plotted their assets against OS mapping then faced the issue of repositioning all of their records. Further impetus came from new legislation – Traffic Management Act (TMA). The UK Government’s aim is to encourage improved planning and co-ordination of road works and companies will have to provide electronic exchange of accurate asset information. For many companies, this requires a complete process overhaul and in-depth analysis of the quality of location data for buried cable/pipe assets.

Central Networks, the electricity distribution company for central England and part of E.ON UK, realised that action was required with 86% of their land coverage affected by the OS PAI programme with the remaining urban 14% affected by new building developments. A worldwide competition was won by Rolta in May 2007 for a three year GIS Data Improvement Project and this project is part of an overall £8 million investment to review, change and amalgamate GIS, creating one enterprise system for the entire company. The project will update all geospatial information and will involve realigning or capturing every single cable of its 133,000km of underground cables and overhead lines that go through 97,000 substations, link boxes and other network assets, and transferring them to OS MasterMap. This realignment will enable the use of GPS technology in the field to capture asset records.

The work is being undertaken at Rolta’s GIS production centre in Mumbai with secure high-speed links between both companies. Rolta is integrating data from numerous sources: scanned images; vector files; database attributes, and uses a variety of systems: GE Smallworld; Intergraph; Bentley; Innogistic; ITS and Oracle to create one comprehensive accurate geospatial database for Central Networks. As the resultant system will be at the heart of asset management, it was important that location accuracy was enhanced and Rolta went even further.

Rolta started with the application of shift parameters to realign the cables and other assets, adjusted using the engineers’ field dimensioning and finally applied the business rules. This back-to-basics approach was also necessary for new building developments where the cables and assets had been plotted against builder’s proposed plans and these now had to be realigned to the as-built position. A further enhancement has been the use of the latest geo-rectified aerial photography to accurately position electricity poles.

So, Central Networks is answering the question ‘Where exactly are my assets?’ by collating all their knowledge and records and reviewing the quality and accuracy in one project. In this highly competitive world where efficiency and effectiveness affect the bottom line, an accurate asset management system is an essential business tool.

For more information visit www.rolta.com or email roland.cunningham@rolta-emea.com

Roland Cunningham is the Geospatial Sales Director at Rolta UK and has over 30 years of experience in the geospatial and IT industry including consultancy, business development and sales. Rolta is a leading provider and developer of Information Technology based services in GIS; Engineering & Design Services; and Enterprise IT with €multi-million projects undertaken worldwide.