Avista is an energy company involved in energy production, transmission, and distribution as well as other energy-related businesses. Avista Utilities is the operating division, providing electricity to nearly 340,000 customers and natural gas to about 300,000 customers across 30,000 square miles in four northwestern states.
Completing the first leg of their ArcGIS Utility Network journey, the Avista team members migrated gas distribution and transmission data to Utility Network and Esri's Utility and Pipeline Data Model (UPDM.) Working with UDC, Avista is using an automated approach to its transition from ArcGIS and Schneider Electric's ArcFM to ArcGIS Pro. Avista is running networks in parallel with change detection functionality that has been refined for the project.
Avista has a long history of geographic information system (GIS) utilization. Over the years, Avista has developed multiple custom business use applications for its utility operations including mobile applications for electric transmission, exposed gas pipe, and leak survey projects. The company most recently implemented ArcGIS Enterprise for gas and electric functions in preparation for the Utility Network.
One of the primary goals of Avista's move to Utility Network is to use the out-of-the-box (OOTB) data model to align better with industry standards, going forward. Staff also want to make their move a gradual transition so that they can continue to edit within the Geometric Network model (GN) while exploring the advanced functionality offered by the Utility Network. Having this capability would help Avista achieve its goal to have all commodities operating on the same platform when the company is ready to fully transition. Additionally, it will allow staff to begin to share the Utility Network data internally, leveraging Esri's Portal for ArcGIS and associated application-building infrastructure.
UDC is Avista's partner, helping to navigate the complexities of migration and configuration to prepare data, using automation where possible, for the advanced functions of Utility Network. UDC created ArcGIS Pro add-ins and a robust conversion strategy to meet Avista's goals. UDC's HEIDE (Utility Network Migration Tool) supports migration with an iterative approach and includes change detection sync from GN to Utility Network for daily updates.
Project Team– Avista's project team is led by Michael Littrel, manager of engineering technical services, and Ron Riel, senior product owner. The team includes Jake Jacobs, Robert Cloward, Allen Cousins, Dylan Karaus, Robin Burchett, and Mike Fallon, who are working closely with UDC's team of Utility Network experts.
Supporting the gradual migration approach, Avista chose to begin its journey on the gas side due to its model being less complex than the electric side's. The team determined that, once migrated, initial use cases would be read-only, and Avista would use web viewers and dashboards to start to visualize the network data that is brought over. The team is actively making prototypes of these items through Portal for ArcGIS, working with internal teams on requirements.
To support Avista's desire to continue to edit workflows within GN and push changes to target Utility Network daily, custom change detection sync tools were developed for the project. The tools include key functions such as validating topologies and building subnetworks regularly.
Helping Avista stay aligned with OOTB implementation, when differences were found between the current model and the new UPDM, Esri was consulted to see what changes might be included in future versions. In addition, any fields added to the UPDM are given names prefixed with "AVA" to make them easily identifiable in the future.
Avista's gradual approach to the Utility Network transition is providing many benefits for the company. It has given staff the ability to carefully analyze all their data sources and determine what is needed and how it should be modeled within Utility Network to achieve their goals for advanced network management, which will be very important for the electric side and its future ADMS implementation. UPDM will provide Avista with the advanced capability to manage both gas distribution and high-pressure distribution/transmission with one data model.
Using read-only use cases and web viewers is helping the Avista team and internal users learn and grow in their understanding of Utility Network. Change detection enables Avista to continue to use familiar editing workflows within GN until users at the company are comfortable and ready to make a full transition. All these factors combined are leading to a very successful Utility Network transition for Avista and its GIS users across the organization.