Utilisphere — Patrolling (aka Breadcrumbing)

I like this idea and think it would be useful as Craig said to ensure all lines were patrolled in a given time period.

Chris: I think if we could do that, that would be pretty awesome to highlight as they went, but if it was easy to highlight line manually to mirror what we do now, that would be good too.  Our current software is based in ESRI, and to patrol with it, we would make an inspection, but then they would have to highlight each drawn span, and set a tag or property in a field to change the color, which there is no way they would go for that!

You could use the estimated route time as a guide if the tech is falling behind. If the tech had completed 2 out of 8 locations on the route, but the 1 half of the expected time had elapsed, then that would be a sign. Or the supervisor could see where they are and compare that to where they expect them to be at that time. Either way would allow the supervisor visibility to potential issues, and he/she could respond by removing a few locations or sending assistance if that is appropriate to the type of work.

Thank you for the feedback so far.

Craig — would your linemen be accepting of a solution that automatically tracked their location as they patrolled so it could also automatically draw the "highlighter" of their path on a digital map? Or, would the preference be for them to manually "highlight" the digital map which would more closely replicate the paper experience?

Thomas — we do not have an "in-progress" concept. The team is using your feedback now to conceptualize this. If this is to be used for identifying if an agent is falling behind schedule, how would you suggest calculating that? Or, do you see that more as something a manager would be calculating in their head as they monitor the day?

The presentation was very clear and did an excellent job explaining the new product. It was easy to follow, presented at a comfortable pace, and it helped me clearly understand the tool’s usefulness.

I do have one question:

Is there an “in‑progress” view that someone in the office could use to see where each person is during their patrol? For example, this could help identify if an agent is falling behind schedule or spending more time at a specific location.

Having this type of visibility might allow supervisors to proactively adjust routes so that stops at risk of being missed could be reassigned to another agent who is ahead of schedule.

I think this is a great start!  At Western Coop, our idea of patrol is a little different.  Our linemen, either as the work they are doing for the day, or on the way back in from the field (we have locations that are 1.5 hours from our main office), will follow our line looking for issues: floaters, broken insulators, broken cross arms, etc., that haven't been caught since they haven't caused an outage.  When they get back into the office, they use a highlighter (with each sub feeder having a specific color) on a paper map to highlight what they patrolled.  We use this to guarantee at least one patrol for all of our line once a year, with a record of what they did.  So if we had our line maps in the Patrol system in Utilisphere, would we be able to mark it somehow as our guys patrolled it, like an ad hoc patrol in the system?  The attached photo shows how the map looks as we progress, with sheets indicating the color per sub, when it was started, and when it was finished, plus notes for areas of the map (in this pic, one shows a note that the area is too wet to inspect).  I should add that these maps are printed from our GIS using ArcPro.