The Client
This energy utility company provides electric power to hundreds of thousands of businesses and homes in the South Central United States. The company is widely acknowledged as a leader and an innovator in all aspects of its business, including power quality and reliability; billing and payment; corporate citizenship; price; communications; and customer service. One such innovation is the company’s deployment of cutting-edge “smart meters” and online tools to monitor energy usage remotely – replacing the need for meter readers at the customer site.
The Challenge
As the company began rolling out smart meters across their coverage areas, the need to see customer and meter information “geospatially” became urgently apparent. Though functional areas of the company had been using sophisticated mapping software (such as Esri ArcGIS) for drawing coverage area boundaries and line and transformer locations, these tools had proven largely inaccessible to all but the company’s most highly trained geospatial experts and did not provide the data integration capabilities for meaningful analysis and reporting. In addition, there was no front-end graphical user interface that enabled location data to be visualized geospatially.
The Solution
The company engaged Stonebridge to develop a custom “spatial dashboard” application that would allow users to not only view the company’s wealth of customer and meter information in a visual context, but also analyze the smart meter deployment in a geospatial manner. To facilitate such a requirement, Stonebridge recommended Visual Fusion, a powerful spatial dashboard tool from IDV Solutions. Visual Fusion boasts a rich user interface built on Microsoft Silverlight and hosted within Microsoft SharePoint. Plus, Visual Fusion’s extensive integration capabilities with corporate software mainstays such as SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle databases, and Esri ArcSDE made it the best-in-class framework for a spatial dashboard solution.
To give the spatial dashboard users—operations employees, management, and rate analysts—a full picture of the business at its core, the GPS-encoded smart meter location information was supplemented with geospatially enabled customer location data. While addresses of both residential and business customers were known, addresses alone were not sufficient to place points on a digital map. Latitude and longitude coordinates were needed. To aid the ETL processes that were loading data into the data warehouse, Stonebridge developed a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service to translate the customer addresses into latitude/longitude coordinates—a process referred to as “geocoding.” The Bing! Maps web service API was leveraged to geocode the addresses, after which the results were passed back to the ETL processes for storage with customer data in the data warehouse.
With smart meter and customer data geospatially enabled, the process of bringing the data into the Visual Fusion tool was almost ready to begin. However, because the data was exposed via WCF services employing SOAP methodology, it could not be consumed directly by Visual Fusion. Stonebridge, taking advantage of Visual Fusion’s extensible data connection API, developed a custom data connection that would consume the web services and pass the data through to the Visual Fusion server components, which would then process and deliver the data to the Silverlight client user interface. With the data points displayed on the map surface, Visual Fusion’s data filtering controls could now be leveraged to slice up the data by parameters such as meter type, installation date, and energy usage ranges, and then used for a variety of analytical uses. Users could then access new metrics such as meter and customer counts, energy usage, and aggregates of each by zip code, city, and district.
The Benefits
- Enabling business users to view and analyze customer and meter data in a geospatial manner
- Supplements business intelligence (BI) reporting tools by providing a location based context
- Simpler and quicker access to critical business data than previously possible
- Ability to bring in external data such as demographic information and weather alerts
- SharePoint security model allows securing of sensitive data and partitioning of relevant data by application user groups