Xcel Energy to implement GeoDigital’s WorkStudio Software for Vegetation Management and Pole Maintenance

MINNEAPOLIS, July 15, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- GeoDigital today announced that Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy has chosen to implement its WorkStudio work management system for Vegetation Management and Pole Maintenance.  Over 700 contractor personnel and company employees in eight states will use the system for day-to-day management of vegetation and wood pole maintenance.

In selecting WorkStudio, Xcel Energy sought a geospatial solution to help meet the following goals:

• Replace their legacy Vegetation Management System with a system that emphasized budgeting, analytics, and geospatial modeling,
• Improve the processes for transmission and distribution wood pole inspection, treatment, replacement, reinforcement and quality control,
• Automate field force activities to improve dispatched and collected work with third-party Vegetation and Pole Inspection crews, as well as,
• Automate the surrounding pre-planning, inspection, work completion and quality control activities,
• Drive efficient work management and more effective risk management.

GeoDigital will supply Xcel Energy with its WorkStudio platform including WorkPlanner for budgeting and program cycle management, VegWorks for mobile vegetation assessments and audits, VegWorker for contractor production reporting, and InfoCenter for enterprise visibility into activity status and budget performance.  

Jim Downie, Xcel Energy's Director of Vegetation Management & Ancillary Programs, said, "GeoDigital has been a critical business partner of Xcel Energy for more than eight years.  In that time we've jointly developed a variety of VM solutions to address imminent threat, danger tree/hazard tree identification, routine maintenance planning and wildfire protection mitigation, to name a few.  This software implementation will bring all of this functionality together into one work management solution that will also enable us to manage a variety of other facility maintenance activities.  Teamed up with front line representatives from our contractors we conducted a rigorous and detailed technical evaluation of the responses to our RFP.  GeoDigital clearly demonstrated they could meet not only our current work management, analytical and field mobile needs, but would enable us to take that next major step in the evolution of our maintenance programs to improve reliability, better ensure compliance, reduce cost, improve worker safety and provide value to our customers."

Scott Rogers, GeoDigital's Senior Vice-President of Enterprise Solutions, said, "We look forward to working closely with the team at Xcel Energy.  Our WorkStudio Best Practices for Vegetation Management will help get users into production quickly, while the platform's configurability and integration capabilities will allow Xcel Energy to support the full range of users and workflows needed on an enterprise software platform that can be readily adapted as Xcel Energy's needs evolve."

Chuck Anderson, GeoDigital's Senior Vice-President for the North American Utility Market, said, "We have worked with Xcel Energy for many years on several cutting edge initiatives, such as laser mapping for NERC vegetation and engineering compliance, fire fuels modeling and tree health analysis due to the mountain pine beetle epidemic.  Xcel Energy's focus has always been to leverage technology, where appropriate, to improve service reliability of their network and reduce total system costs.  We appreciate the trust Xcel Energy has once again placed in GeoDigital with this important initiative." 

About Xcel Energy
Xcel Energy is a major U.S. electricity and natural gas company with regulated operations in eight Western and Midwestern states. Xcel Energy provides a comprehensive portfolio of energy-related products and services to 3.4 million electricity customers and 1.9 million natural gas customers through its regulated operating companies. Company headquarters are located in Minneapolis. More information is available at www.xcelenergy.com.

About GeoDigital
GeoDigital International provides utilities and other distributed asset industries with innovative geospatial information management solutions.  With one of the largest fleets of airborne/mobile LiDAR and digital imaging sensor systems in North America, we collect and process data under the most challenging project schedules and conditions.  Our enterprise software products are then tailored to meet the specific business workflow needs of our customers, including the ability to support mobile workforces in real time.  GeoDigital continuously improves our services to deliver timely, mission critical geospatial information systems that increase efficiency and reduce risk.  Please visit us at www.geodigital.com. 

SOURCE GeoDigital International, Inc.