Enterprise GIS Integration – What Does It Mean for Pipeline Operators And How Does It Related to Pipeline Integrity?

Enterprise GIS has done an excellent job of providing broad access to geospatial data, creating a common infrastructure upon which to build and deploy GIS applications, and exposing organizations to cost reductions through economies of scale. Recently, “enterprise” and “GIS” have been linked with a third word: integration. This new concept is revolutionizing the way pipeline organizations do business. Enterprise GIS integration is poised to become an integration technology that will be fused into every aspect of an organization’s operations, thereby changing GIS into an operational requirement and a way of conducting business.

What is Enterprise Pipeline Integration?

Every pipeline organization has implemented key enterprise information technologies. In some cases they are Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM), Human Resource Management (HRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Document Management Systems (DMS). For others it is Work Order Management (WOM), Asset Management Systems (AMS) or SCADA. Regardless of the type, they were selected because of their ability to optimize operations. A common link between all of these systems is that the information they manage is spatial in nature; but few of these application have access to true geography. In parallel, GIS users are maintaining geography at a great cost. Enterprise GIS integration is simply the process of exposing geographic information and GIS functionality to other enterprise solutions, thereby providing a spatial context across enterprise systems and making geoprocessing capabilities available to any application that may require it.

To integrate GIS across the pipeline enterprise, project-based point-to-point integration approaches are replaced by flexible, reusable integration components that merge the enterprise applications and GIS transactions into enterprise services. These services become vehicles to launch operational processes and tasks from within a user's primary application, a portal or an information dashboard. Users take advantage of the services to monitor key business events, trigger alerts and workflows, or execute tasks within enterprise applications. These services are not meant to replace existing GIS functions, but rather extend GIS and make it more pervasive, transparent and easier to use so pipeline organizations can focus on improving operations.

Why is this Important for Pipeline Integrity?

“Pipeline Integrity Management” is a phrase that means different things to different people. Traditionally pipeline integrity included the practices of corrosion prevention, pipeline inspection and repair. More recently though, it has used to describe the practices and services that pipeline operators employ to maintain or increase the profitability of their assets while limiting their liability. When properly enacted integrity management is both.

As the world’s pipeline infrastructure has aged, it has deteriorated and corroded, thereby increasing the likelihood of a pipeline failure. The consequences of a failure are a significant corporate concern as environmental impacts, cleanup costs, public safety, downtime and repair all have an impact on the organization’s image and bottom line. Internally these risks are weighed against the overall costs of an integrity management program. So while a portion of the company is looking at how to prevent failure through the analysis of threats, another group is trying to balance program costs and consequences against revenues.

While many organizations are realizing that long term integrity planning is a way to reduce corporate risk, decrease operating costs and improve overall asset optimization, it requires vast amounts of data and wide reaching analysis to be effective. Historically, companies have created long term plans by manually integrating information from various departments on a chronological reporting period. More recently, enterprise systems like ERP or WOM have been used to revolutionize this process; however, even these new tools have no capability to include geography in an analysis. So how do you answer a geographic question in a non-spatial system? It requires Enterprise GIS integration.

An integrated enterprise with GIS as the backbone is a data hub where spatial and non-spatial records are integrated. An application, or portal, can efficiently sift through massive amounts of data using either geography or specific/relevant criteria to select only the required records. GIS-based enterprise integration can also provide revolutionary functionality.

Consider a scenario where you need to create a new cost center and would like to roll up the pipeline maintenance costs against it. In an ERP this could take hours or days of work. Using a GIS, a single feature is created representing the new cost center and ERP numbers are accumulated against it. These software “dashboards” allow users to quickly and easily mash enterprise data together to make difficult decisions. The most valuable characteristic is that this type of integration is transparent to the user; everyone becomes a GIS user without even realizing it.

None of the integrity management processes described here are new. Integration simply provides an efficient way to bring enterprise data together and it creates a new framework for making decisions that will optimize the way pipeline companies do business. If you are interested in other ways that GIS can be applied to the pipeline industry, visit www.esri.com/pipelines