Whenever I hear the phrase “the world’s first” or “for the first time ever”, I get a little skeptical. I tend to agree with Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant who said, “There’s nothing new under the sun – you just get a can of paint out.” With that said, I’d like to share three Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure utilities and telecommunications customers who were truly first.
EPB of Chattanooga
Chattanooga, Tennessee’s city-owned Electric Power Board (EPB) is a long-time Hexagon customer and runs a combined electric and fiber network model.But electric utilities are not the only service EPB offers; it also provides customers with broadband internet services. Powered by Intergraph G/Technology Fiber Optic Works, EPB built the nation’s first community wide 1-gigabit-per-second internet system. In 2016, EPB was ranked by Consumer Reports as the best utility in America for consumer satisfaction for its TV and internet service. Wiredmagazine has also ranked EPB faster than Google Fiber for offering 10 gigabit-per-second internet service across its network.
Bell Canada
As Canada’s largest telecommunications company, Bell Canada offers a wide-range of products and services and requires back-office integration with other systems, including SAP. Bell Canada uses Hexagon’s Intergraph G/Technology solutions to maintain a definitive source of reliable, location-based information that fully describes its networks and connectivity. With our system, Bell Canada has improved the productivity of its 550 concurrent users by automating critical network design steps, which reduces redundant data entry and manages the complete engineering life cycle of its networks.
Bayernwerk
Bayernwerk is the largest electric and gas distribution network operator in Germany’s Bavaria region and one of the largest in the country. It serves more than two million customers with an electric network of 116,818 miles and a gas network of 3,728 miles. Today, 1,400 employees across 19 regional centers use Hexagon’s system to input changes and obtain network information. Hexagon’s utility network model management solutions are at the heart of Bayernwerk’s activities, supporting planning and analysis, design and construction, maintenance, fault management, and network calculation. Hexagon’s solutions also help Bayernwerk manage the transition to renewable energy. Bayernwerk’s territory contains more installed photovoltaic capacity than the entire United States. About 265,000 renewable energy systems feed into the grid, and the data and feed-in requests from those systems are stored in Intergraph G/Technology. Since Hexagon’s system is the basis and data source for network calculation, this renewable energy data is also used for planning new networks.
Our utility network solutions are built based on the following:
- An open database that supports multiple utilities, which are combined into a single database.
- A robust data model that models assets as they are in field. Not just geographically, but supporting intelligent detailed views.
- Logical connectivity which is kept in the database and is available to any system in the enterprise.
- Sophisticated versioning which allows for jobs to be kept in a single database and mimics business practices.
- A true enterprise system where data can be exchanged throughout.
To learn more about these our customers, check out their case studies. If you want to see our utility and telecommunication network management solutions in person, join us at HxGN LIVE 2018 in Las Vegas!
