Making Sense of Transmission Inspection Reports

Bitesize Electric - Utility asset inspections – Episode 2

In episode two of our transmission inspection series Jeff Cito, Senior Customer Success Manager and Aimee Beasley, Senior Product Owner for Utilities at IQGeo, share insights on one of the biggest pain points in the industry: accessing historical inspection records and making sense of current reports.

Let’s dive in…

Episode 2: Better Access to Inspection Records

Jeff Cito

Welcome back to Bitesize Electric. We're rolling into episode two of our series on transmission inspections. Today, we're talking about a pain point we all hear, all the time, how tough it can be to pull up the past inspection records and how to make sense of current reports. I'm joined again by Aimee Beasley, Senior Product Owner for utilities at IQGeo. Aimee, thanks for joining again.

Aimee Beasley

Good to be back Jeff.

Jeff Cito

I want to start with end to end inspection records. From what's happened before a new inspection to how new inspections are reported. Maybe you can get us started by talking about what kind of data an inspector in the field needs to see at the beginning of the process?

Aimee Beasley

Certainly, when an inspector is looking at a structure, perhaps for the first time, what they need to understand is what was noted previously by the inspector that had been there before. Not all inspections are on an annual basis. They need to be able to look up the previous inspection that occurred there, see the notes and any other defects that were recorded at that time. If there are present defects or there's new defects for them to record, they need a simple interface to fill in that information at the back office needs. And they also need to keep an eye on whether or not any of those defects have gotten worse over time, in which case there might need to be a higher priority or a faster response time to correct that particular type of defect. And what they want from IQGeo is to be able to access all of this from a single interface, where they can see both the information about the previous inspection, the information about the structure that's in front of them to confirm that that data is also accurate, such as whole stamp date, and that this is the right pole serial number, and then as well ensuring that the map is visible and that the map is reflecting what they're seeing. So the person that comes out to do the next set of corrections are being sent to the right place. So I would say that's kind of the end to end process before they move on to the next pole or inspectable item.

Jeff Cito

Once they've completed an inspection, how do they generally report that information?

Aimee Beasley

Inspectors in the field will often perform a series of inspections in a row, so they might have a particular line that they're trying to review in a day, or just a segment of a line. Once they've completed each individual inspection, they would batch that change up and then report it back to the office, whether they're a contractor, external contractor or a member of the company, they generally rely on ad hoc CSV exports or SFTP batching tools or separate reporting tools to get the information back. So there is a time gap between when the inspection has been performed in the field and when the back office is able to perform analysis and understand if any additional work needs to be dispatched to correct issues, or even to confirm their progress of the inspection season.

Jeff Cito

I know many of these utilities have corporate reporting environments like Power BI. How do updates through IQGeo application integrate with these?

Aimee Beasley

Our customers on the cloud hosting environments are able to use the IQGeo Data Warehouse, and with the IQGeo Data Warehouse that can be connected to Power BI, Tableau or any other corporate reporting tool to directly pull and generate reports off of the IQGeo database tables. There are also API endpoints provided if a customer would like to do direct querying of the database for custom reporting.

Jeff Cito

It seems like this kind of data access across the inspection lifecycle will really streamline the process. Thanks again Aimee. We'll see everyone on episode three.

Next episode - Photo AI: From Association to Analysis 

Tune into episode 3 of the Bitesize Electric series for insights on streamlining retrieval of past inspection records and interpreting current reports.