Digital Program Development

Mat and Eric served as key and essential contributors in a consulting engagement for an Investor-Owned Utility to initiate and operationalize a novel LiDAR-based data collection and inspection program to manage organizational risks and enable operational improvements while reducing costs. The program has connected 6+ business units while producing higher quality organizational data through the unified planning, scheduling, and execution of LiDAR data management.

Situation

A large utility company utilized LiDAR data across numerous business units to accomplish individual operational needs. Operating in siloes was leading to increased costs relating to the initial investments in collecting baseline LiDAR datasets while also contributing to organizational risk through the lack of traceability of data.

Objective

Safely collect and leverage LiDAR data to obtain high precision latitude/longitude data, identify vegetation encroachment on transmission and distribution assets, and enable engineering analysis to simulate asset behavior in extreme weather conditions.​

Solution

  1. Authored Program Strategy: Designed charter, operating model, and organizational governance to enable the centralization of LiDAR data collection and exploitation. ​

  2. Designed Operational and Data Architecture: Pioneered a process to ingest, store, and analyze data in a centralized location to meet multiple end user requirements.​ Unified scope planning and scheduling into a single integrated process to enable single-point management and procurement.

  3. Supported Procurement Activities: Developed a statement of work and requirements to scout, qualify, and contract vendors.

Results

Successful standup and deployment of novel centralized LiDAR program that enabled 6+ end user groups to successfully complete their asset management missions with the same data set, created ~$4MM in cost savings through shared services, and developed baseline for trend and proactive analysis. ​

  • Developed 20+ skill requirements needed to manage end-to-end program processes; facilitated operations through vendor partnership to complete first year requirements while providing feedback on practices and outcomes.

  • Developed an end-to-end framework to standardize the intake of 75+ LiDAR requirements from 6+ business units and centrally manage collection, storage, and risk evaluation consolidating $3.7MM in costs and eliminating redundancy.

  • Evaluated the technology needs for 5 distinct program stages and developed targeted recommendations for tools to visualize, store, and assess 10+ TB of raw and processed LiDAR data.

  • Established foundational governance, charter, and LiDAR program manager role; provided the newly established PM position with the documentation and training needed to manage the program through successive cycles.

  • Built support and cross-functional knowledge sharing across 6+ business units to adopt new processes and a “data-centric” perspective on utilizing LiDAR; created an enduring program that maximizes data utility and saves costs.

Previous

Digital Intelligence Program