The cost of your electric utility GIS implementation is dependent upon several key factors including how your organization will use the system, your need for advanced capabilities, and the state and quality of your existing data.
Getting Started – Base GIS System Pricing
The base install of GIS editing, and web browsing software, will be in the $500K to $800K range plus the GIS product vendor’s cost of their ELA being driven by number of users. Depending on which GIS vendor, you may want to add to the base GIS technology software products that were built specifically for electric utilities to manage the daily maintenance of their electric network which will add $250K to $400K. These products have software licensing tied to number of editors.
Maintaining your as-designed and as-built states of your electric network is the primary function of data editing within a GIS.
Enterprise GIS for Advanced Capabilities
The high value of an enterprise GIS is using it to feed the network to your operational systems: ADMS or OMS, engineering planning systems, and work management systems. With modern enterprise GIS technology that includes mobile GIS applications, we believe using the GIS to plan, create, dispatch, perform, monitor, and report on for all planned compliance, inspection and maintenance work is a great use of enterprise GIS technology with the integration to your EAM of choice with all job completion details including labor and materials. Using the spatial BI power of the enterprise GIS makes it a natural technology for things like reliability engineering analysis and outage communication dashboards.
UDC has an electric enterprise GIS reference architecture that addresses using the enterprise GIS in all these electric energy delivery business areas and integrating the GIS with the other business domain systems: ADMS, OMS, DERMS, CIS, CRM, AMI, MDMS, MWM, EAM, Engineering, GWD, CMS and CAD. These are typically broken up into business releases that are focused on a few business applications and the related set of enterprise GIS applications and integrations. Based on the number of related energy delivery systems in use, budget a range of $6M to $10M depending on if you take advantage of some of the enterprise GIS implementation frameworks available that bring enterprise GIS applications and field applications. UDC does perform both enterprise GIS and ADMS roadmaps for our electric utility clients.
Preparing Your Data for GIS
Finally, a GIS needs to be populated with your circuits and substations. If going from paper and CAD to GIS, we call this data conversion, and its cost is based on number of data sources that must be touched in order to populate the GIS manually. If you are upgrading from an existing GIS, then it should be a digital data migration. Data Conversions can run into the tens of millions depending on number of circuits and customers. Data Migrations will be in the $500K – $800K range depending on the quality of the data in the current GIS and how much of the newer functionality found in modern GIS’s is looking to be enabled.
Additional Benefits & Savings of Enterprise Gas GIS
Enterprise gas GIS implementations should leverage the enterprise GIS technology even more than their electric counterparts. Rather than integrating with an OMS, we find the GIS technology stack to be an excellent avenue to provide both a Gas OMS and Gas Digital Twin for gas companies. Most gas compliance, inspection and maintenance activities are both periodic and based on surveying an area, so they don’t use the higher-level asset management paradigms enabled by EAM vendors such as reliability centered maintenance and failure driven maintenance.
Enterprise GIS can be used to plan all gas compliance, inspection and maintenance work, create all planned work and dispatch it to the field. It can track breadcrumbs and job completion details and integrate with EAM with just the completion information as well as integrate with the company’s content management system to be compliant with the traceable, verifiable and complete regulations. This lowers the cost of integrating with EAM for gas companies, but more strategically, it lowers the O&M cost of maintaining the gas compliance, inspection and maintenance programs by having them be self-maintaining in the GIS rather than manually creating them all and maintaining them all in the company’s EAM system every year. No more expensive asset synchronization between GIS and EAM is required for all periodically maintained asset types. The implementation and O&M cost savings associated with moving all of this work to the enterprise GIS is in the millions of dollars for most gas companies over a ten-year maintenance window.