A Decade of an Integrated and Accurate As-Built Pipeline

Challenge

A major intrastate gas transmission pipeline company with over 50,000 miles of pipeline needed assistance with their large backlog of as-built data to update their GIS. Staffing changes and multiple major mergers and acquisitions created a substantial backlog and had limited the client’s ability to perform the work in-house.

Solution

Beginning in 2009, TRC has worked directly with the client’s GIS staff as an extension of their GIS team. The client’s as-built documents are downloaded and analyzed in order to perform the necessary as-built data entry directly into the client’s GIS system over secure remote networks.

By having the ability to perform the work remotely, our team was able to save the client on travel and on-site expenses, as well as increase the efficiency and speed of the work. Updates and maintenance to the GIS records were performed in a versioned geodatabase environment in order to have a continuous back-up of the data and a safety net for unforeseen errors or issues.

Results

TRC has since completed over 4,000 as-built updates for the client and counting. This long-term project has transitioned from catching up the large initial backlog to the TRC team becoming a daily and integral part of the client’s team by maintaining and updating the GIS with all additional as-built requests. Over the course of this project our team has also performed other GIS-related tasks such as schema updates, data management and data migration.

The client sees value in continuing to utilize our team due to increased accuracy and quality ratings to 98% and decreased as-built management costs of 7%. Recently this client recognized TRC and specifically the Data Management team as having the highest quality score for all their suppliers and were congratulated with their 2019 Supplier Performance Award.