For gas companies today, the regulatory landscape is rapidly evolving. New laws, such as ASTM F2897, continue to raise the standards for how gas utility companies must manage and track their assets in the field.
To maintain compliance with ASTM F2897 and other emerging industry regulations, gas companies are required to ensure that their infrastructure assets are performing safely, reliably, and sustainably – and to report the condition of field assets at a more granular level than ever before. Attributes ranging from the exact location of an asset to its material composition, size, manufacturer, model, lot number, production date, and facility, and maintenance history must be digitally recorded into gas company databases, reported to regulators, and updated as conditions in the field change over time.
Digitally Transforming the Industry
While in the past gas company asset data has been collected by field crews primarily through manual processes or hybrid models involving both manual documentation and digital apps, the need for gas companies to digitize their asset management processes has never been greater.
To help gas utility companies capture the essential asset data they need to comply with regulations and achieve the operating performance they are seeking, a new generation of geospatial technologies is revolutionizing the industry. Aided by intelligent workflow automation and highly visual map-centric interfaces, these solutions are empowering back-office teams and field crews with the tools they need to more effectively communicate, collaborate, and share real-time geospatial data.
While there are many digital asset management solutions available to gas utility companies today, not all offer the full range of capabilities they need. To maintain assets optimally, keep pace with increasing consumer energy demands, mitigate risks, and stay in compliance, investing in an enterprise-grade geospatial solution is a best practice every gas company should follow. Serving as a point of integration across field asset management systems and applications, an advanced platform can deliver deep visibility into the condition of assets and real-time situational awareness that gas companies need to achieve these and other goals:
- More comprehensive and proactive management of their infrastructure
- Better troubleshooting of problems before they escalate
- The ability to ensure the health and safety of field workers
- Improvement in response times when service outages occur
- Complete, up-to-date asset management records
- Reduction in both operational costs and regulatory risks
Here’s What to Look for in a Solution
An ideal digital asset management solution should be built around geospatial technology that allows gas utility companies to both track and trace assets and integrate that data into all related operational and business process workflows.
The platform you select should be scalable, configurable, and enterprise-wide, and it should allow you to import geospatial data regarding field assets into interactive digital maps that allow your team to drill down and view pertinent details about infrastructure assets.
The platform should also automatically sync data between mobile apps, back-office servers, and applications deployed in the cloud to ensure that all stakeholders can see the same up-to-date data and efficiently plan surveillance, maintenance, and repair work accordingly. It should enable fast, easy workflow creation and management as well, without requiring additional coding, and feature automated work scheduling engines and distribution modules for mapped asset data.
With the right digital asset management technology in place, gas companies can realize these and other benefits:
- Real-time data sharing across systems, applications, locales, and personnel
- The ability to analyze data for strategic assessments, predictive modeling, and more informed decisions on field deployments
- Automated workflows to accelerate productivity and reduce human errors
- Faster responses to outages for more reliable service uptime and better customer experiences
Why Choose EpochField
With EpochField, gas utility companies can gain the visibility into the condition of field assets and the real-time situational awareness they need to understand and record high volumes of asset data, optimize the performance of assets, ensure safe, reliable energy delivery, and meet the regulatory mandates governing the industry. Highly configurable to meet each gas company’s unique operational requirements, EpochField offers these and other advanced features:
- Mobile offline collection and viewing of asset data for field personnel who are often working in remote locales, without an Internet connection
- High-performance digital maps that display geospatial data holistically and dynamically update as new data is processed by the system
- Configurable work order forms that are produced automatically based on field mapping data
- The ability to customize schedules, work orders, and other operations documentation for the specific project or situation at hand
Schedule an EpochField demonstration today.
