The Challenge
Snohomish County Public Utility District (SnoPUD) is the second-largest publicly owned utility in the state of Washington, USA. With more than 350,000 utility customers, SnoPUD’s utility network was too complex to rely only on incoming calls and secondhand information to monitor the state of its network and prevent future outages.
To better inform its in-office and call centre teams, SnoPUD needed a solution that would provide a complete operational picture of its network and on-the-ground operations at all times. The new system would have to automatically update information without hundreds of hours of manual labor. SnoPUD also wanted a system that would integrate data from online mapping services so the utility provider could overlay map data from external sources, as well as integrate real-time weather information.
The Solution
Building on its successful use of Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure’s Intergraph G/Technology software, SnoPUD selected Hexagon to develop a web-based network outage reporting and analytics solution to examine current and historical events across its network.
At the core of SnoPUD’s solution is an easy-to-use web portal that provides operators and managers a complete, up-to-date picture of the utility network. The web portal provides a map-based view of assets, outage events, historical analysis and weather conditions from multiple sources. SnoPUD also has integrated automatic vehicle location (AVL) capabilities, known as Network Fleet, with its web portal. With AVL, SnoPUD can monitor the status of its utility vehicles including current and average speed and vehicle type.
The system’s combined features have helped operators and managers improve communications, streamline operations, save money and reduce outage restoration times.
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