Posted by James Griffiths, General Manager of WaterTrax

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is James Griffiths, General Manager of WaterTrax, a Vancouver-based software provider that helps agencies and utilities companies manage operational data for their water and wastewater systems. View our webinar series to learn more about Google solutions for the utilities industry.

To provide clean water to millions of people every day, utilities must analyze petabytes of data to spot and correct potentially dangerous incidents in water treatment and distribution networks. As a provider of operations management software, WaterTrax is always looking for ways to make data monitoring and management easier and more effective for our utility customers.

Mapping of Sampling Points

We integrated Google Maps into our platform to allow WaterTrax users to quickly visualize system data on a map. We created a Google Maps-based tool that provides a spatial display of water system structures combined with real-time water quality data. Quite literally, our product allows utility managers to see how water quality is being affected as water flows throughout the entire system.

By displaying complex data in a visually appealing way, Google Maps helps our customers spot issues and identify trends instantaneously. Utility managers get a visual view of recent test results, compliance history, alerts, complaints and sampling schedules — all mapped to specific locations. Instead of poring over spreadsheets and structured tables to spot trends in sampling data, now they see this data right on a map. We’ve observed that customers like plotting sampling locations on maps using street view, satellite view and terrain view. They also appreciate being able to quickly export map data into their Geographic Information System (GIS) databases.

Mapping of most recent free chlorine results in the distribution system

Going forward, we’ll continue to add enhancements to our Google Maps offering. Already, we’ve added features based on customer feedback. California-based Golden State Water Company wanted to see a glimpse of their chlorine results to know if sampling was up to date and contaminant levels were within acceptable ranges. So we created a search feature in Google Maps to display only the most recent test results. This feature would be most beneficial during an emergency situation such as a high chlorate incident, where Golden State Water would use the WaterTrax mapping interface to track real-time data across their system. The searchable map shows the most recent lab results, so the team can visualize in real-time where chlorate levels increase or decrease to take immediate action.

At WaterTrax, our goal is to make real-time data monitoring easier for utilities. Google Maps allow our customers to spot potential problems quickly, so they can ensure public water safety and quality for millions of consumers every day.

Mapping of most recent free chlorine results in the distribution system

Posted by Tony Matheson, Manager Distribution Network IT Program, Powercor Australia Ltd.

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Tony Matheson, Manager Distribution Network IT Program for CitiPower and Powercor, electricity distributors whose core business is to deliver electricity to homes and businesses in Melbourne and throughout central and western Victoria. See what other organisations that have gone Google have to say.

As an electricity distributor, our primary job is managing assets such as poles, wires, and other equipment with a focus on safety, reliability, and cost effectiveness for 1.1 million customers, 80,000 kilometers of power lines, and more than half a million power poles. Every fault or outage must be managed, corrected and restored as quickly as possible, and risks to community power supplies caused by major events such as floods and bushfires must be avoided or mitigated swiftly.

With power distribution equipment spread across a wide area, we need to see the geographic locations of assets like poles, power transformers, switchgear, and so on, along with photos, maintenance, and planning information from our other enterprise systems. Yet we couldn’t overlay our data or put it into the context of an outage or other incident that might be happening in real time. The incumbent geographic information system requires specialised training to use and serves more specific functions. We needed something simple and effective to be able to overlay information from a variety of third-party sources including real-time emergency services information, as well as add further value and usefulness to data housed within our existing SAP Enterprise Asset Management software and Data Warehouse.

After considering several options, we chose Google Earth Enterprise because it would offer powerful 3D visualisation technology that would be intuitive to use for everyone in the company, without training. We used the Google Earth API to customize our own view of the virtual globe to meet our exact business requirements. Our virtual globe is now housed onsite on a server behind our company firewall.

Google Earth Enterprise allows us to create maps depending on the need, share them with others, and reach remote workers, so everyone has a consistent and familiar experience wherever they are. Google Earth Enterprise is so innovative and flexible that we can develop iteratively, with agility, and at a very low cost. We often can add a new layer to meet an immediate business need on the same day it is requested.

Today, we are delivering better, faster service to customers and driving business efficiencies. Situations can be analysed and acted upon with speed and accuracy. Google Earth Enterprise has helped us become far more innovative and agile. The investment required was low, and the benefits were immediate.

Posted by Posted by Alastair N. Jenkins, President & Chief Executive Officer at GeoDigital

Editor's note: They power our homes and supply clean water - utility companies fulfill our most basic needs. This week we're showcasing the Utilities Industry and the ways they’re relying on Google Maps for Business to improve operations and keep the lights on. Today’s guest blogger is Alastair N. Jenkins from GeoDigital.

If you've ever pruned or weeded in your backyard, you've had a glimpse at what we do at GeoDigital. We help keep weeds and trees under control on nearly 300,000 miles of utility corridors so power lines stay clear and the electricity keeps flowing to homes and businesses across North America.

We don’t actually trim the vegetation, we record it. Keeping track of growing vegetation is a never-ending task and one that requires us to compile a lot of data. To organize and gain better insights from the information we collect, we rely on Google Maps Engine.

Maps Engine has become an integral part of our operations. Using LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology, we first survey the land and gather utility corridor data with specialized air and ground mapping services. We then turn this data into business intelligence that the utilities companies can use to plan vegetation management. They also use this information for compliance reporting to regulatory agencies.

To make this information easy to digest, we have integrated Google Maps Engine and Google Earth Pro with our Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. Users can view color-coded LiDAR imagery that depicts existing vegetation, projected tree growth, and other obstructions that may interfere with utility maintenance activities. Multiple Google Earth layers - including Borders and Labels, Places, Photos, Roads and 3D Buildings - provide context, so planners can make better, faster scheduling and deployment decisions, while analysts can more efficiently report on regulatory compliance. Mobile workers gain the same benefits using their phone or tablet. For the utility companies, getting this kind of information in an actionable format used to take months and now it can be just a matter of days.

With Google Maps Engine we’re at the forefront of the vegetation management and compliance markets, helping our utilities customers stay ahead of the weeds.

Posted by Jeremy Heath, Network Manager, Sutton and East Surrey Water

Editor's note: They power our homes and supply clean water - utility companies fulfill our most basic needs. This week we're showcasing the Utilities Industry and the ways they’re relying on Google Maps for Business to improve operations and keep the lights on. Today’s guest blogger is Jeremy Heath from Sutton and East Surrey Water.

At Sutton and East Surrey Water (S&ESW), we supply water to almost 700,000 customers each year, stretching more than 2,000 miles. To manage such infrastructure for our day-to-day operations, quickly assigning and tracking jobs in the field is a top priority. Like many utility companies, we’ve relied heavily on paper-based work orders to manage customer service calls and repairs, a process that added extra work hours for our employees. Then we discovered Google Maps Coordinate.

Introducing Maps Coordinate to S&ESW’s meter fitting and repair teams allowed us to improve productivity and cut costs. Before every team would spend an hour at the end of the day filling out paperwork. Today, we can use the Google Maps Coordinate smartphone app to record data and build reports on a daily basis. Replacing our paper-based workflow with Maps Coordinate has resulted in a 17% increase in operational efficiency and an overall return on investment (ROI) of 500% based on time and cost savings.

Using the same technology as Google Maps, the Coordinate app provides our dispatchers and repair teams with a unified view of past and present job details. Our employees in the field can share their location, manage jobs and record data directly in the app. And because it incorporates the easy-to-use Google Maps interface and rich set of mobile features, we can provide our employees with a tool that is simple and familiar, minimizing training requirements.

Without the need for complex configurations, adopting Coordinate’s web and mobile app was simple and easy to do for our employees. Since we were able to run Maps Coordinate on our existing smartphone network and back-end technology, we deployed the mobile and web-based apps across S&ESW within weeks. This helped us to further reduce development time and costs.

Integrating Google Maps has changed the way we communicate and operate our business. Its allowed us to achieve an impressive ROI and save thousands of dollars in printing costs alone. Above all, we’re meeting demands for better quality service and providing the clean water that our customers depend on everyday.

Posted by Bryan Friehauf, product line leader-software solutions for GE’s Digital Energy business

Editor's note: They power our homes and supply clean water - utility companies fulfill our most basic needs. This week we're showcasing the Utilities Industry and the ways they’re relying on Google Maps for Business to improve operations and keep the lights on. Today’s guest blogger is Bryan Friehauf from GE.

Electric companies are responsible for providing safe, reliable energy to thousands of households. At GE’s Digital Energy business, we know our utility customers have a big job to do and are constantly looking for efficient ways they can meet growing energy demands.

To help our clients improve mission-critical operations, we’ve developed a suite of applications for the utility industry. GE’s Smallworld™ technology brings users smarter ways to plan and design networks, manage jobs in the field and visualize assets using Google Maps. With access to Google’s mapping tools, we’re giving our customers location-based technology that is fully customized for their operations and easy for their employees to use.

By integrating the Google Maps API, GE’s Smallworld-powered Distribution and Outage Management Systems can display location-based information on a Google Map. With a GE device in-hand, a utility worker can see infrastructure that’s down in real-time and quickly respond to the situation. This gives our utility customers a portable solution for gaining information on-the-go.

In addition to having instant, mobile insights, our Smallworld applications give users access to data visualization on a map that is familiar and accurate. Teams in the field can use features like Google Street View, helping them more efficiently locate assets that are hard to uncover, such as transmission lines, or a repair job.

From planning electric, gas and water distribution systems to designing telecommunications networks, having the right tools to visualize and manage complex infrastructure is critical for today’s utility industry. But with Google Maps integrated as part of our applications, we’re making it a little easier.

Posted by Pascale Bernal, CIO of Gaz réseau Distribution France (GrDF)

Editor's note: They power our homes and supply clean water - utility companies fulfill our most basic needs. This week we're showcasing the Utilities Industry and the ways they’re relying on Google Maps for Business to improve operations and keep the lights on. Today's guest blogger is Pascale Bernal, CIO of Gaz réseau Distribution France (GrDF). 

The GrDF natural gas pipeline is 194,600 kilometers (120,900 miles) long. In other words, it’s almost five times longer than the circumference of the earth. Google Maps for Business has made it possible for us at GrDF to manage every detail of that network and build on top of it.

In less than six months, we used Google Maps for Business, including Google Maps Engine and Google Earth, to import and organize more than 18 million data points about our pipeline. Google’s map solutions helped us create Gazm@ps Raccordabilité, an online platform that better serves our customers, technicians and partners.

Gazm@ps helps us run more efficiently by providing our sales, marketing and technical teams with continuously updated views of streets and municipalities served by GrDF. Each day, more than 1,000 employees access customer locations, geographic coordinates, Google Maps Street View, and municipality information through the familiar Google Maps interface. Our natural gas technicians use Google Earth’s 3D maps in Gazm@ps to plan installation and service work before they go out into the field. We also use Google Maps for Business to combine our geographic information system and customer relationship management systems inside Gazm@ps. With one click our salespeople can instantly see anything they need to know about a potential customer’s property, including location, coordinates and Street View. This costs 60 percent less than our previous customer relationship management system.

Prospective customers use Gazm@ps when they visit our customer website and enter their address to instantly find out if they are eligible for GrDF service. Each eligible customer is connected with a salesperson who can access relevant information, including a Street View of the service location and details about the municipality they live in. Since we launched Gazm@ps in July 2012, our user base has grown by 30 percent per quarter and the site now accounts for 10 percent of GrDF’s overall site traffic.

We’re also using Google Maps for Business to create Gazm@ps System, an external site that will help heating and plumbing service providers, home builders and local authorities access our mapping data. Using Google Maps to share this information is much easier than the expansive spreadsheets we used before. We’re also developing Gazm@ps Zio, a tool for infrastructure operators that verifies mapping data the partners send to the government for its national database of power distribution, sewerage and telecommunications systems in France.

We serve more than three-quarters of the French population while managing vast amounts of infrastructure, so having accurate, easily accessible data about our pipelines and our customers is essential. While we connect all the pipes underground, we use Google Maps for Business to help us better connect with our new and old customers above the ground.

Posted by Tarun Bhatnagar, Director, Google Maps for Business

Editor's note: They power our homes and supply clean water - utility companies fulfill our most basic needs. This week we're showcasing the Utilities Industry and the ways they’re relying on Google Maps for Business to improve operations and keep the lights on. 

Utility companies have a lot of information and assets to manage. From water to electric power, demand for clean, reliable energy is at an all-time high. This puts even more pressure on the industry to find the best solution for improving operations, whether it's integrating simple asset management, investing in visualization tools or integrating real-time communications with customers.

Google Maps for Business brings the power of Google Maps and Google Earth to an organization improving decision making, optimizing operations and creating engaging applications. Its scalable, familiar technology offers a diverse set of map applications, APIs and cloud-enabled tools that are fully customizable. When applied to utilities companies, Google’s enterprise mapping solutions can let organizations see their data layered on a Google Map and securely share this information with employees, key stakeholders and the public.

This week you’ll hear from several leaders in the utilities space who are using maps to solve industry challenges. By adopting Google Maps for Business, these companies are changing the way they manage jobs, streamline and consolidate processes and better engage with their customers. You’ll hear stories from companies around the globe who have opted for easy-to-use mapping technologies as a way to optimize operations.

Check back here this week and learn more about how today’s utilities are realizing the benefits of Google Maps for Business.