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Electric Cooperative Streamlines Version Control with Process Automation
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Electrical Grids
- Utilities
Applicable Functions
- Procurement
Use Cases
- Time Sensitive Networking
Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Arizona Electric Power Cooperative was facing significant challenges in managing the engineering drawings that support its generation assets and Southwest Transmission Cooperative’s system. The process of making changes to these drawings was extensive and manual, often taking months to be incorporated into the system. This delay resulted in version control issues, as engineers could not be certain if a drawing on the cooperative’s SharePoint was the most up-to-date version. The cooperative maintains tens of thousands of drawings, and changes to a drawing meant a slow and manual change order process. The cooperative’s engineering records library contains about 50,000 records, including versioned, finalized documents, reference material, and unincorporated documents. The existing system was not effectively managing the versioning of these unincorporated documents.
About The Customer
Arizona Electric Power Cooperative Inc. is a major provider of electric power, serving more than 147,000 meters and 350,000 coop-members in Arizona, California, and New Mexico through six Class A member distribution cooperatives. It is one of 68 electric generation and transmission cooperatives in the nation and owns and operates the Apache Generating Station. The cooperative manages all the engineering drawings that support its generation assets and Southwest Transmission Cooperative’s system. It maintains tens of thousands of drawings and its engineering records library contains about 50,000 records.
The Solution
The cooperative integrated the Nintex Platform into their processes to solve their version control challenges. This platform allowed the cooperative to immediately make marked-up drawings available to engineers, eliminating the months-long wait for final drawing changes. The Nintex Platform’s Advanced Workflow capability moved the development of workflows from an IT activity to a business activity. Using Nintex, the cooperative developed a process where engineers mark-up drawings with their changes and send them electronically. Workflows automatically kick off that alert administrators and the designers who’ll be making the updates. The marked-up drawings are posted in the online records library so engineers can learn about them immediately. The records administrator now spends significantly less time indexing these records.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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