GIS Leads the Way at Exelon

Headquartered in Chicago, Exelon Corporation is one of the US’ largest energy companies distributing electricity to approximately 5.4 million customers in the states of Illinois and Pennsylvania and natural gas to approximately 480,000 customers in southeastern Pennsylvania. As with many other utilities, the company has been implementing GIS at the organization, applying it to both internal business processes and their business to customer interactions.

Some of the areas GIS has been applied include engineering and mapping work, management of service outage restoration, automated support and guidance of field forces, and geographic display of service outages on the internet and other electronic delivery channels. “GIS is applied to individual business process as the technology matures to fit a business need and the business case is justified,” explains Curtis. “As GIS is becoming ubiquitous in Exelon and the need for interoperability among the various application increases, we are taking a more integrated, and strategic planning approach our use of GIS.”

Before implementing any of the technology there were a number of factors that needed to be considered by the team at Exelon. The first of these was to have a solid business workflow in place in order for data to be updated in a timely manner. There was also a need for staff to be properly acclimatized in order that they could use the technology sufficiently.

Many benefits have been apparent since the introduction of the technology, including reduced costs and improved efficiencies. Curtis outlines some of these advantages: “By their nature, electric and gas utilities are heavy dependent on geospatial data – knowing where the physical assets are located,” he highlights. “This information has been historically maintained on paper maps. GIS enables reduction in the dependency on those maps both as the storage and communication media of that data. Benefits of GIS are found in labor cost reductions and increased productivity (engineering and mapping applications), faster restoration of unplanned service outages (i.e. storm recovery), and improved customer relations.”

In contrast, Curtis also highlights there are also some challenges associated with implementation, none more so than the fast pace of changes in the industry. “Challenges of implementing GIS are keeping pace with the technology evolution, in terms of specialized skill sets and complexity of the architecture, and interoperability between proprietary technologies,” he says. “Interoperability standards are evolving and use of proprietary technology is lessening as the mainstream business database vendors expand their support of GIS and GIS software vendors enable their products for the web.”

A further challenge that utilities are faced with is the increasing need to meet new regulations and manage geospatial data. The FERC Standards of Conduct is a regulation that Exelon needs to comply with. “Exelon takes a firm stand in not allowing public access to transmission data,” informs Curtis. “We utilize a standardized process for allowing access to the data by validating that individuals who request access have completed FERC Standards of Conduct training. All data is maintained on secure systems inside of the company firewall.”

Curtis hopes that GIS solutions will evolve enough in the future so that it becomes more of a real-time update. “Getting the data to the field as quickly as possible will better enable the workforce. Also, GIS will expand to better track the assets of an organization. This will improve the reliability of the system and allow better analysis of system health.”