NEWSROOM

ENTRUST integrated service offerings from Field Services to Data Solutions are tied together by an integrated GIS providing best-in-class production and quality. ENTRUST experts Eric Cowan, Martin Roche and Ellie Lynch offer their perspectives on how ENTRUST is supporting a strategic data improvement initiative at a multi-state client by providing two phases of a three-phase project.

A client has invited ENTRUST to embark on a multi-year project to meticulously survey their entire distribution system, aiming to validate and gather location data, often for the first time. Spanning across various states with vastly different landscapes and ecosystems, this ambitious project encounters diverse original data conditions. While parts of the distribution system are already digitized, others remain unmapped. Complicating matters, assets obtained through the acquisition of another company introduce discrepancies in data and mapping standards across different regions. Approximately 45% of the client’s service lines are absent from their mapping system, prompting ENTRUST to undertake the task of collecting this missing information.

Eric Cowan, VP Field Services: A Field Services Perspective

I work on the field side, which is where it all starts. Understanding our clients’ needs helps us develop digital collection methods for getting information from the field to the next phase of the project (or business). This is a critical pipeline to improve efficiency and the value of what we do as a company. Having a good working relationship with the other business lines inside ENTRUST allows us to keep our clients’ needs as a top priority while utilizing latest technologies and methods.

Field applications (or field data capture) is the starting point for a lot of the information that we are using every day to make decisions around what we need to do with our clients’ assets and how we should schedule and plan personnel. Making mobile solutions, or data collection solutions, that are easy to use in the field and that capture information, solves problems for our field solutions and field services teams. These solutions should be designed so that data can then be transferred or brought into other parts of the design process, whether that is capturing existing conditions so that the designer can identify where the new assets need to go, or identifying constructability issues with the current assets, or capturing as-built information for our customers so that they can then manage that asset using that information for the lifecycle of the asset.

Working with Ellie’s teams makes our field collection projects run smoothly and more efficiently, because we can access some of this existing data while we are performing our collection, particularly in our GPS collection projects. Working with them to build the collection tools, the methodology behind the collection, what is going to be collected, and the frequency of the collection, works very well. This is because there is a seamless flow between the field and the data solutions teams. We can collect a lot more data for our clients than they initially request, and they have been very happy with that.

Martin Roche, VP Data Solutions: A Data Solutions Perspective

 Our Data Solutions group is completing GIS phase three by providing QA and QC services for the digitized assets. The Data Solutions team is reviewing the completed work from phase two and ensuring that the investment that our client is making in data capture, data collection, and digitization is paying off with the high-quality data they require to meet their business requirements. We helped our client design their quality program and execute it, ensuring that the deliverables support their long-term needs. EN is known for our quality deliverables for this type of work, which is why we were selected for phase three. That has been made possible by having our teams work more efficiently.

Additionally, our customer is relying on us to provide up-to-date reporting on the quality and project progress, which is made possible by the integrated GIS and field solution provided by the Digital Transformation team supporting ENTRUST’s full workstream from field data collection to quality control.

Ellie Lynch VP Digital Transformation: A Digital Transformation Perspective

Digital transformation is hosting a mobile data collection solution that is allowing Eric to do the things he just described, and providing insight to our quality teams when the work comes back through for final quality review. The GIS solution developed to support our field teams not only helps us ensure efficient and effective work, but also provides critical insights to our client for how the program is running. What started as an internally-focused tool to support our teams has been integrated into our client’s system to support their project management functions and program planning and prioritization.

The solution is robust due to the functional requirements of our field teams as well as the data requirements that came from our GIS team and our customer reporting needs. Because we are supporting field crews who could be working in one state or three states at the same time, we had to build a solution that worked in many different conditions, working across all those different geographies, different cell phone connectivity, online/offline modes, availability of WIFI, etc.

This was an exciting project to support, to build an enterprise workflow that added value across multiple phases of work and ultimately was fed back to our customer for their decision-making processes.

Want to learn more about how our sectors work together? Check out the #BetterTogether page here.

Sabrina Zekis

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