Energy

- Manhole and Underground Utility Line Inspection Ensure Service and Safety

An electricity distribution company provides electric and gas utility service to 40 cities and towns in eastern Massachusetts. Service interruptions, impacting service for millions of people, are intolerable. Routine, preventive inspection is the key to finding, cataloging and satisfying maintenance needs and ensuring continuous service. It is for this reason that utilities have led the way in acceptance of the mobile technologies that PenFact’s XMD software embodies.

The utility needed a process that would automate preventive inspection, eliminate stacks of routine paperwork, improve accuracy, and deliver information in reports that were easy to read and understand. It chose PenFact’s XMD software to inventory, inspect, and document its activities for two aspects of its distribution system: manholes and underground transmission lines.

Using ruggedized computers, workers inspect hundreds of manholes. This is a critically important activity: without it, manholes could explode sending manhole covers flying into the air, and creating pedestrian and traffic risks, or electric current could contact water and electrocute utility workers or pedestrians and their dogs.

The utility also uses PenFact’s XMD software to inspect 22 underground transmission lines: the lines that carry power in bulk that feed the transmission lines which run to individual homes and businesses. Those lines are oil cooled, and the oil levels must be monitored closely.

The utility chose PenFact’s XMD software to automate inspections because it is easy to use in the field, adaptable to the unique inspections at each power line station, and easily implements repetitive inspections for manhole inspections. PenFact’s XMD software provides for a direct flow of data to reports, which both improves the accountability of inspectors and improves decision making in the field. With PenFact’s XMD software, paper forms were replaced with electronic forms. Inspectors pick up their mobile computers at the beginning of each shift. The computers have been preloaded with a list of manholes and power lines to inspect that day. If the inspector finds a problem, PenFact’s XMD software issues a work order request that is sent to the repair department for follow-up. PenFact’s XMD software also kicks out reports on oil levels.

Even though it automated preventive inspection, eliminated stacks of routine paperwork, improved accuracy, and delivered easy to use reports, users apparently appreciate two aspects of PenFact’s XMD software the most:

PenFact’s XMD software eliminated the time spent organizing files, paper and people so that they could redirect efforts to preventing and fixing problems.
PenFact’s XMD software’s multi-level, customizable picklists standardized how inspectors report problems : inspectors appreciate the ease with which they can use nested picklists to select from among hundreds of reportable types of problems.

Picklists are user-predefined answers or data that can be tied to a particular task in the electronic form. They are organized in an outline form, with subsets under each heading. So, to take a simple example, if there were water in a manhole, and five possible actions that the inspector could take, he or she simply taps on "Water in Manhole" on the pen tablet. Then the five possible actions appear. The inspector taps on the relevant one. PenFact’s XMD software automatically records the result, and presents the inspector with his or her next task. Simple, fast, and easy, picklists speed up both the acceptance of a new technology, and completion of work.

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PenFact, Inc. · 500 Harrison Avenue, Suite 3R · Boston, MA 02118
Phone: (617) 482-6900 · Fax: (617) 482-5155 · www.penfact.com