An Introduction to CartoPac Enterprise: Virtual Brew 8/17/2023

Speakers

Ed Kruft, CEO & host

Aaron Cysensky, CartoPac Product Owner

Transcript

Introduction

Aaron Cysensky
So, first — who am I? I think Ed’s sort of led with my title there. I’m the product owner for Cartopac Enterprise. My name is Aaron Cysensky. I’ve been with Cartopac since 2018, and I was with Cartopac when they were acquired by American Innovations in 2020. Previously, I served as an implementation specialist for the Cartopac team, so this gives me really excellent insight into our software, our customers, and the industry in which we help solve problems.

I have 15 years of experience in IT product management, global information communication systems, and quality assurance, so I think that positions me very well to be right in between our software development team, our implementation team, and our customers.

In my past life, I served eight years in the U.S. Air Force — I did satellite communications, and I oversaw nuclear security communication systems throughout Europe and Central Asia. So I’ve had a great opportunity, but I’m pretty happy I’ve landed here in Fort Collins, sort of like Ed alluded to there.

So, why am I here today? Primarily, I’m here because Cartopac Enterprise hasn’t had an opportunity to talk with the Virtual Brew team yet, and I feel like that’s just a missed opportunity to get to know the customers I’m supposed to help serve and solve problems for. I’m really excited to chat with the AI customer base, get to know you, understand your problems, and open your eyes to our existence and our participation at AI World this year, which — as Ed mentioned — we have our own track, and a number of joint presentations as well with other AI teams. And in general, we’re just really excited to share Cartopac Enterprise’s problem-solving initiatives with the American Innovations customer base.

What is Cartopac Enterprise?

So, what is Cartopac Enterprise? Ed referred to it a little bit — Cartopac is a software suite that enables field data collection using highly customizable and configurable data collection workflows, quality control processes, back-office integrations, and an array of peripheral devices. Those peripherals include high-accuracy GNSS devices — the two devices you see here are the ones we primarily deploy, and these are, I’ll say, more than sufficient to get you past the most stringent of regulations. We can get down to the decimeter level with these devices, so it’s more than enough to cover any regulatory bodies we’re working with here.

Additionally, we also store behind-the-scenes metadata about the information you collect — this includes what was collected, who collected it, when it was collected, and the degree of accuracy and the confidence interval. What that allows us to do is store this information in your GIS or back-end system with a high degree of confidence, so you can fully explain attributes about your collected pipeline assets.

Additionally, we make use of laser rangefinders and barcode scanners to aid the data collection process. Laser rangefinders allow you to collect information in a hostile GNSS environment, and a barcode scanner allows for the automated entry of really any data that can be encoded into a barcode. We see a lot more of that on the plastic gas distribution side, due to the ASTM standards, but we can all keep holding our breath — on the transmission side, that will get a barcode system in place before long that allows us to ease the integration, implementation, and data entry of steel pipeline assets and appurtenances.

So that’s a little bit about what Cartopac is as an application suite. I’d like to talk a little more about what we do and the problems we help solve. American Innovations has built a purpose-driven field data collection software, the FDC application that many of you are familiar with, and it’s focused heavily on corrosion control and the processes around it. Cartopac Enterprise, on the other hand, is a very general-purpose but highly configurable software suite — it allows for the collection of any spatial or non-spatial assets, with a specialization around integrations of disparate data sources, bringing all of that information to the mobile device so you can collect data using all the information necessary to make your field users successful.

I kind of like to say Cartopac can collect anything that occupies a space on the Earth — might be a bit hyperbolic, but I still believe that in my heart — whether that’s a line, a point, or represented as a polygon.

Some of those key workflows include gas distribution as-built solutions, regulated pipeline as-built, leak identification and tracking systems, inspection, repair and maintenance of steel and regulated pipelines, and pressure test management. If we have some time at the end, I can tell stories about how we’ve also tracked cougars, mountain lions, and jet ski races — because it occupies a place on the Earth, so we can track it.

Additionally, some of the key system integrations I’ve alluded to include GIS systems — both Esri and non-Esri, please don’t tell the Esri folks that, but it’s true — reporting and file management systems that allow us to upload reports directly to your file management and content management systems, as well as report generation. We interface with SAP, WAM, and Maximo work order management systems, both enterprise-level and homegrown systems — we can pull that data from disparate sources together to aid the field user in their data collection and reduce the amount of manual entry required, because we all know manual entry can lead to mistakes.

We’ve interfaced with inventory management systems, operator qualification systems — okay, we’ll talk more about OQ in a little bit, so I’ll save that topic — and we work with both UPDM and PODS data models, as well as less-known data models. As long as we can write it to a table, Cartopac can help you collect that information.

Ed Kruft
Hey, Aaron — I think we actually have one, one of our larger PCS long-time clients — we’re actually using Cartopac technology behind the scenes to integrate PCS with SAP, I think, which is a pretty cool project.

Aaron Cysensky
Absolutely — at Ed’s point, it just allows us to pull data together, because we know we can do more with more data, and sometimes our data is in these very disparate systems, but Cartopac has the tools to help bring that information together, even if it’s to aid in the collection of something outside of Cartopac, like Ed alluded to.

On the right-hand side, you see an example of one of the reports I talked about — this was for a company, New Mexico Gas, that Cartopac has been working with for about three or four years now. It’s a completely custom-built report for New Mexico Gas, in order to replicate the paperwork process that they’re used to seeing — some people don’t want to go from paperwork to digital transformation overnight, and having this process replicate a known process for the users adds a lot of value.

The Cartopac Ecosystem

The Cartopac Enterprise suite really consists of three separate applications, and we’ll start on top with the mobile device. The mobile device is kind of where the magic happens — it’s the field data collection application. This is the device your users take to the field — they connect to peripheral devices, those GPS receivers, barcode scanners, and laser rangefinders, and they actually go collect the data in the field with that high degree of accuracy and customized, configured workflows.

Our mobile application suite is available in both Windows and iOS — a small departure from the AI applications you’re used to working with, where they support Android and iOS. Cartopac is a Windows and iOS application suite, primarily.

Once your data collection is complete, you then upload that information back to the server — the Cartopac server application. Its primary functionality is to assist with user authentication and access, and the management of project uploads and downloads — this ensures that your data gets back to the data source it needs to live in, whether that’s your GIS or a work order management system. It’s also where we handle all the data integrations with GIS, and that doesn’t seem like much, but it’s exceptionally powerful, because what that allows us to do is not concern the field device with integrations — if we can do the integrations at the server level and bring you a fully functioning project with the necessary data down to your mobile device, it allows for faster mobile performance and a better user experience in the end.

And lastly, we have what we call Cartopac Workflow Manager, or CWM for short. CWM is our quality control application — it handles automated approval and routing of your workflow, handles all of your report generation and automated email notifications. This is the tool we use to ensure that once data is collected in the field, it also goes through a proper quality control process before being submitted back into your GIS for final review and approval.

There’s a lot going on in this slide, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that — but this is simply a sample of data collected via the Cartopac workflow, as a digital representation of, in this case, a gas distribution as-built package. I chose this photo because it provides an excellent example of the quantity and quality of Cartopac-collected data. As we zoom in a little bit here, you’ll see within this collected set of data we include pipes, fittings, various structures — most of these in this case are homes — offline points, rights-of-way, and intersections, which are of the most importance, measurement and stationing values, which we’ll talk more about later, as well as spatial photos. And if we zoom in one more time, you get this representation of all of the data that a field user collected around this gas distribution system.

All of this data is incredibly important for gas pipeline operators, as it allows them to understand exactly where their assets are, who put it there, and what is upstream and downstream of these various components. All of these in this image are collected at less than six inches of accuracy, so any person with a GPS device can walk back to any one of these points with a shovel and find the asset that they put in the ground, however many years ago it was. So I think this is a wonderful representation, again, of the quality and quantity of Cartopac-collected field data.

Customer Success Stories

Now, before I move into what I’m really excited to talk to this team about, I just want to show some of these customer stories that we’ve worked with over the last couple of years — I’ve worked with all of these customers explicitly.

Dominion Energy West — formerly Questar Gas — deployed Cartopac in 2012; they’re one of our longest-standing customers. They have over 250,000 service lines in the greater Salt Lake area mapped with Cartopac, and over 5,000 miles of distribution main pipeline, which is just a wonderful success story for a relatively small team out of Utah.

New Mexico Gas, who the report we saw was from — they deployed Cartopac in only 2019, and they’ve elected for a slower rollout, because they want to prove out the efficiency gains they can achieve with Cartopac. And the crowning achievement of that has been: submission-to-completion of field paperwork went from over 50 days to a single day of processing and posting to GIS, once we deployed Cartopac with them — that includes all elements of the Cartopac software suite: their field data collection, their server full of integrations, and the Cartopac Workflow Manager suite, to help them with their routing, management, and approval of field-collected data. So, just a wonderful success story out of New Mexico.

And lastly, TECO Peoples Gas, out of the Florida area — they’re a relatively new Cartopac customer, within the last three or four years, but they’re processing 25,000 services annually. At this rate, they’re absolutely collecting a massive amount of data, and they’ve reduced their annual service card processing time — a very similar process to what we saw with New Mexico Gas — by 51%. TECO elected for a more robust quality process, with a lot of checks and balances and reports included, so it wasn’t as dramatic as 50 days down to one, but a 51% reduction in processing time is something we’re really proud to have helped them achieve.

Regulated Pipeline / Transmission Workflow

So now everyone’s probably asking: what does this have to do with me? Why is a product owner of a field data collection tool, primarily concerned with plastic gas distribution, talking to a group of cathodic-protection-centric field users, or users in general?
It’s because of the regulated pipeline workflow Cartopac and American Innovations are incredibly excited to announce that we’re working on — bringing our technology, best practices, and experience of field data collection to transmission pipeline operators. You’ll probably hear me interchange the terms transmission pipeline and regulated pipeline — I know the purists out there are going to tell me that’s not quite right, and I’m happy to be told that time and time again, but old habits.

With the development of a regulated pipeline as-built workflow, with an emphasis on satisfying regulatory guidelines for tracking and traceability of steel pipelines and appurtenances, we’re focused on response to audit, weld tracking, material pedigree, as-built reporting, while implementing standardized photograph, OQ, X-ray, and NDT test suite recording processes.

Q&A

Aaron Cysensky
And yes, we did have one question from Tammy — please.

Tammy Soto
Have you made any updates on CWM to update states for selection — for more than one survey group? State updates, groups?

Aaron Cysensky
Tammy, do you mind if — towards the end of this, if you want to stick around, we’ll make sure we get to the bottom of that, and I understand your entire question before I give you a bad answer.

Ed Kruft
So, thank you — maybe you can give a good answer. Is this Tammy Soto? Yeah — welcome, Tammy, I hope we’ll see you at AI World again this year.

Aaron Cysensky
Okay, great, thanks, Ed.

So, how are we doing this, I guess, is the question. Cartopac has partnered with a host of our existing gas distribution customers to take their successes, best practices, and understanding of Cartopac technology, and we want to bring that to the regulated pipeline industry. We want to work with those who have a stake in the transmission pipeline space, and work together to build a workflow that’s built by pipeline operators, specifically for pipeline operators.

We’re doing that with an intent of solving compliance with evolving PHMSA regulations, avoidance of penalties during PHMSA audits — because we know, we’ve seen the kind of reports that go around when these things happen — and we want to equip you to be successful for your transmission pipeline mapping endeavors, really.

Some of the key components we hope to track with this are pipe location, pedigree, and installer, and the more we can automate this through OQ systems, the better quality data integrity you’re going to have in the background. We want to do this to ensure public safety, foster compliance with PHMSA and the Mega Rule guidelines, and allow you to have a complete understanding of what is installed on the ground, who installed it, and exactly where they put it — which includes comprehensive pipeline segment inventory, location attributes, and OQ (operator qualifications) and conditions records on pipeline design, construction, and material.

This one, I probably could have given its own list of bullets, but this is really important — Cartopac is working to integrate with these back-end systems, that include material management systems, pipe pedigree, weld pedigree, and OQ systems, and MAOP and pressure test systems, to ensure you have a sole source of true, Cartopac-quality collected data to represent your transmission pipeline systems.

What’s the Point?

So, what’s the point — what does all this drive to, I guess, is the next question. We’re building a turnkey solution — the solution is intended to be 80% ready, based on all of the requirements we’ve gathered from our steel working group, the customer base that’s helping us build this workflow. We’ve done this in a way that we solve 80% of the problems out of the box, which means only 20% of configuration — and that configuration is primarily focused on your integration pieces: how do we talk to your work order management systems, your material management systems, and your operator qualification systems. Those are what we really want, and then we want the rest of the system to allow it to be deployed without much change. We’ve taken that approach because we want to allow this to deploy rapidly — we all know no one wants to spend time on a long, drawn-out project. We want to get you in the field collecting data and returning value for you and your field users.

This workflow is hosted in American Innovations’ SOC 2-hosted environment — it’s our compliance-first workflow, with an emphasis on high-accuracy GPS and operator qualifications. We have a handful of integrated as-built reports that will come with this, including weld pedigree, material pedigree, and operator qualifications, as well as a standardized NDT collection process, which is not something we’ve really seen implemented in the past.

The solution comes with a dual-station configuration — both continuous and land-based measurements — so it allows us to be both spatially aware through GPS, land-based, and continuous measurement value of your pipeline systems. And lastly, this includes real-time GIS synchronization — what that means is, the moment your user is confident in their data and they hit the upload button, we can make that information available to you and your stakeholders immediately, and this just unlocks a world of potential for GIS teams, business managers, and decision-makers, really.

Cartopac is really excited to build a regulated as-built workflow — it provides a rapid, low-cost-of-entry access into a high-quality field data collection solution, hosted on AI’s Azure environment, SOC 2-hosted, an AI environment where users can begin field data collection of the most complete as-built data package, faster than we’ve ever enabled before.

We’re really excited to give a demonstration of the solution when we have more time — at AI World coming up in November, we’ll have an entire presentation on this solution. I hope we can see everyone we had in Virtual Brew today join us at AI World.