Our client, a major utility, had previously deployed a mobile field force automation solution to over 400 mobile crews. As part of a multi phase mobility system project, work orders are prepared, scheduled and wirelessly dispatched to mobile field workers.

The immediate benefits to the client were significantly improved reaction times when responding to faults and outages. This led to improvements in their regulatory/operating license KPI’s.

The next phase was to extend the solution to provide mobile GIS capability to the field crews as part of their workflow.

Cybersoft was engaged to evaluate the client’s mobile GIS business requirements and provide costed solution options.

It’s a Big Small World

Our Client is a long-term (and sophisticated) user of the GE Smallworld GIS system. A key design challenge was to define a solution that integrated to a centralized Smallworld system while still allowing the mobile users access o GIS data in the field irrespective of whether they were wirelessly connected or not.

Our approach was to

• Validate the business drivers and existing Client GIS strategies

• Assess the existing enterprise GIS solution and identify gaps and opportunities

• Describe business processes and develop business requirements

• Determine the target solution architecture and define technology principles and standards

• Identify Solution options and map solution options to solution blueprint

• Review the market place for potential solutions

• Determine ‘best fit’ based on agreed criteria

Cybersoft managed the design and prototyping of a solution that elegantly integrated to Smallworld and extracted (via ETL) corporate GIS data in a form suitable for one time deployment to the mobile devices

With a copy of a subset of the corporate Smallworld GIS system now encrypted and stored on each mobile device, the challenge became keeping the local mobile GIS data synchronized with the Smallworld system.

(It is an important architectural principle that the existing enterprise GIS systems be the “source of truth”. Maintaining multiple different corporate GIS systems is extremely expensive and invariable leads to data quality issues.)

With over 60,000 updates to the corporate GIS system occurring each month it was clear that the GIS data stored on the mobile devices would quickly become out of date.

The solution was to automatically:

• Extract a “delta” or “difference” from the corporate GIS system each week (using the Smallworld checkpoint capability),

• Compress the delta data

• Wirelessly transmit this delta to each of the mobile devices.

Integration

The more advanced client requirements necessitated the capturing of information in the field by the mobile users, for example:

• 
• Identify, select and mark the asset requiring work on a map

• Identify and select other impacted asset/s (e.g. affected assets) on a map

• Display and identify affected properties for financial rebates

• Identify and mark errors on the map

This effectively required the integration of the mobile GIS solution into existing and new business processes and workflows:

• Asset identification was sent to the works management system

• Affected properties were sent to the customer management and financial systems

• “Redlining” of errors on the maps were sent to the Smallworld corporate GIS system

Cybersoft identified and specified the integration points and underlying XML formats for the extraction and integration of this field captured data to the corporate systems.