PCS Field Data Collector
CartoPac Mobile
Archer 4 Handheld Data Collector
Shop Online
Bullhorn WebTranscript
PCS Survey Manager: Where It Fit
Today we’re going to be talking about Close Interval Survey and DCVG survey management, and we’re going to be using PCS Survey Manager to facilitate that discussion today.
This slide — I’m going to touch on it briefly, and it’s the only slide I’ll be talking about today — I just wanted to show where PCS Survey Manager fits in the overall PCS ecosystem. On the far left, we’ve got PCS Compliance, which is really the backbone of our compliance system, and includes a number of modules that are all listed there. PCS Survey Manager really resides between PCS and PCS Field Data Collector, in some ways, because it enables you to have a lot more optimized workflows when you have all three products together. What we’re going to be talking about today with PCS Survey Manager is that bottom bullet there — around ECDA analysis and reporting, and specifically Close Interval and DCVG data.
Close Interval Survey: Core Capabilities
So, with that, we’re going to go ahead and jump directly into the product. Survey Manager is a web-based application — available anywhere, on any device that has an internet browser. Today we’re going to be talking first about Close Interval Survey. There are a number of different survey types in here — you can have depolarized surveys, you can upload your wave prints, and then you can attach those wave prints directly to a survey file as well.
So, with that, we’re just going to open up a survey here, and I’m going to talk through some of the capabilities you have. First of all, this chart and the map that go along with it are tied together — you’ll notice, as I scroll my cursor through the chart, there’s also a little cursor that scrolls along the map, so I know exactly where in a geographical area I am. If I want to drill into the actual data point on the table itself — say, this peak, or this spike, that my mouse is on — all you have to do is hold down Control and click, and the table zooms automatically to that point. You can scroll over and see some of the data behind it, if there were any remarks — and then, ultimately, at the end of the day, you can enter a remark in here as well. I’m just going to say “test remark” — you can put whatever you’d like in there — and this also feeds out after you export or download your data, so it maintains that as you’re working through these different data files.
Some of the other capabilities here — we’re going to talk about the chart for a bit. You’ll notice these pink and red threshold lines — those are customizable, so on a survey-by-survey level, as your voltages change in different regions you’re operating in, you might want to adjust where those threshold levels lie. It also drives some exception reporting. I’m going to change the upper bound here — well, actually, I’m going to leave it where it’s at, it’s at a good level for this survey — I’ll change the lower threshold to one, in this example, just to fit my data set a little better. Say Apply — you’ll notice it shifted that boundary line up a bit.
What that does is, under Tools, there’s this on/off exceptions button, and you can choose whether you want to show lower thresholds — where your readings go outside of that threshold boundary — or upper thresholds. Then you can go ahead and say Run — it does a bit of thinking, and then you’ll notice some blue shading on the chart and some orange shading. From there, you can drill into it, look at your data a little closer — again, you can Control-click, and it’ll pull you exactly to where in the table you’re looking at. Anytime you click and drag, like I’m doing with my mouse, it zooms in further — not only on the chart, but also on the map — so you start to get a very clear and concrete view of what your data is telling you.
If you want to go back at any point and clear those, under Tools there’s this Clear Chart Regions option, and it resets all of that. Also under here, you can say Inversions — it will highlight on the chart anytime — this data set doesn’t really showcase that well, they’re pretty far apart from each other, but anytime your on and off readings are inverted from each other — when the off is actually a lower potential than your on reading — it’ll highlight that immediately. I think I have another survey in here I can show that in a bit more detail with.
You also have the ability to flag spikes — you can say, flag any on’s more than a certain custom voltage that you specify, and it goes through and starts to think through your data. In this case, there are a few here — and it tells you — and I forgot to mention this in the initial screen — you can tell it how many readings before and after that spike reading you want to average together, in order to correct any spikes you see in your data. Of course, if you do flag any spikes, you’ll have to enter a comment here, and that will feed into the exported data file and maintain that data integrity as you walk through. Then you can use these little arrow keys to go through and flag spikes and skips accordingly as you walk through your data.
Close Interval Survey: Multi-Segment Tools
Other capabilities for Close Interval Survey — now I’m actually going to drill into a different survey file, a multi-segment survey. What this allows you to do is very easily reorder and reverse survey segments. So if you have a situation where you have multiple different day plots for one particular Close Interval Survey — say, a technician crew running in one direction and another crew running in the other direction, and their uploaded data ends up looking flipped from each other — I’ll show what that looks like. I’ll go ahead and reverse this one — you saw how easy and quick that was.
You’ll notice it resulted in this weird gap, because as I’m scrolling through the chart, if you keep your eye on the map, it’s going to jump to the other side of the survey — that means this survey segment is reversed from what it should be. All you have to do is click this little Reverse button, say Refresh, and it’ll rebuild that survey file for you — you’ll notice we now have one continuous survey. Then, at the end of the day, all you have to do is say Export, or Download, and it’ll package all of that data up in either a spreadsheet or a PCS file that PCS can bring in directly. You can indicate the different data elements you want to include as well, and it packages all of these different survey segments up into one continuous file that you can then upload into PCS — or send that continuous survey file to an operator, if you’re a contractor company who executed this survey on their behalf, and really easily stitch things together.
Some other things to note here — there’s this Depth of Cover chart, and you’ll notice some blue in here around this area — you can customize these bars, so when your depth of cover is a little close to the top, you can say, I want anything over 24 inches to show up as a bright red bar. All of that’s done in the chart options pane, under Depth of Cover — you have full customizability in terms of what these bars look at, so you can quickly identify any areas of concern.
These icons are really just informational, for the most part — they show up anytime a remark is entered. In this case, these are all Depth of Cover remarks, but you can customize these icons as well, by going in and telling it which ones you want to show.
If you’d like to attach a wave print to a Close Interval Survey, all you have to do is right-click in the chart — there are a number of options in here, we’ll talk through a few of the others in a bit, but first, if you want to attach a wave print, all you have to do is say “Wave Print,” and it’ll pull up any wave prints you’ve uploaded into Survey Manager, or that your field technicians have wirelessly synchronized up from their Field Data Collector application. You can attach wave prints to a specific point in the survey, and that’ll show as an icon as well — I think I need to refresh my screen to get that to show up, I’m not going to do that right now, just to save time.
And then, finally, one other Close Interval Survey capability I want to touch on briefly is the ability to splice files together. If you have two different survey segments with overlapping GPS coordinates, you’ll see this little half-filled-in circle icon that you can click on, and it’ll allow you to pull those two files together and merge — eliminating the overlapping data from one of the segments. The segment you’re splicing into is the one that will maintain those records, and the “from” segment will have those records removed, if that makes sense. You just click it, it’ll pull that up, you can scroll through and see exactly where your overlapping data is, and then all you have to do is say Splice.
Okay, moving on from Close Interval Survey — now we’re going to get into DCVG. Actually, there’s one more thing I wanted to touch on with CI real quick — a common question that comes up is around GPS coordinates, and how they come in from the field, and whether you can control if your stationing is controlled by your GPS coordinates, or if you want a fixed increment — if you’re in Canada, say, one meter. All of that is controlled from the field, in the Field Data Collector application, when the survey is created — on PCS Field Data Collector, they have the capability to control whether they want to capture a GPS reading at every single reading captured, or if they just want to capture GPS every, say, 100 feet or 500 feet — they have different capabilities there, or they could say, I want to capture a reading every one meter, two and a half feet, whatever it is. It’s fully customizable in terms of what they can do to capture stationing, in terms of GPS coordinates. I just wanted to mention that quickly.
DCVG Capabilities
So, DCVG capabilities in here — the indicator bars that show up anytime you have a DCVG indicator on your survey show up as these little bars in the chart. These are also customizable — this is your IR loss percentage — if you want to customize which IR loss percentages show up as red for immediate concern, you can do that under the DCVG option. Again, fully customizable in terms of your preferences — you can specify the different levels here, and anything at that top level will automatically show up as the color you specify. Out of the box, it’s red.
So, just wanted to talk through the fact that you can control what these bars show up as — but this is really your IR loss percentage — and again, same capability applies, you can Control-click, and it’ll pull you to that specific point in the survey, and you can see some additional information specific to that indication as well.
Overlaying CIS and DCVG with Snap View
DCVG surveys and Close Interval surveys tell you a lot about the overall segment health of your pipeline, and whether there’s actually a concern that requires immediate action or repair — and that’s really showcased by overlaying the two surveys together. So if you want to overlay a DCVG survey with a Close Interval survey from the same pipeline segment, all you have to do is click this — Add to Snap View, which is the overlay module in Survey Manager — and just say, I’m going to name this “DCVG VB” for Virtual Brew, and Submit — it goes ahead and sends it over. I’m going to find its CI counterpart, which is actually the same survey we were talking about earlier — again, click the same thing, “CIS VB” — you can add any notes here if you’d like, and it sends it over to Snap View.
Then, in Snap View, you can find all of that in your staging folder — I’ve got a lot going on in here, so I’m actually going to clear the screen out before adding anything, and I’ll talk through why in a second. So, this is the Close Interval Survey VB that I just sent over here, and if you want to find the overlaying survey segments that apply here, all you have to do is — I think it’s a magic wand icon, the little icon over there on the left — it will automatically search through any survey files that have been sent over to Snap View, and identify which ones have overlapping GPS coordinates. You can specify what that buffer distance is that it looks for, and say Submit.
So, I’m going to choose that same DCVG VB — it’s going to want you to give it a name, so I’ll say “Virtual Brew Overlay,” and it’ll build that file. So, I still have the CI survey here, but there’s this new “Virtual Brew Overlay” file at the bottom, with that same pie-chart-style icon that was over on the indirect survey side, indicating that it’s an overlay file — and you can click which ones you want to add. That’s the chart, the map, and the table — and how you arrange these is, you just click and drag on this yellow piece, and it’ll put things where you want. So if you want the map over here on the left, you can do that; if you want the chart up here on the top left, you can do that.
I’m going to close the Close Interval Survey, because now we have the Close Interval Survey with its DCVG counterpart, all highlighted really nicely — and you can see immediately if there’s a spike in your CI survey that also has a DCVG indicator aligned with it. Again, you can add any comments in here as well.
PDF Reporting
This can also be exported to a chart PDF — if you say Create PDF Report, you have a number of options you can include, and this PDF report — I should mention — is also available for just CI surveys and just DCVG surveys. That same icon I just clicked, the little Adobe Acrobat icon, is present in both the Close Interval Survey section I was in earlier, as well as DCVG. So you can build these reports — you can give it a cover page, put logos on there — if you’re a contractor company, you can have your logo on one side and the operator’s company on the other. Then you can say if you want the map included on the same page, just below the chart, or on its own page, or if you don’t want to include the map at all — whether you want it portrait or landscape — and just say Submit, and it goes through and builds that report for you, tells you it’s generating it, and then you’ll see this little green indicator show up in the bottom-right corner once the report’s done being built. You can click on that, and it opens up in a new tab.
It’s also going to send me an email with that — I actually just got it on my watch — it triggers that email at the same time. So it doesn’t just let you build and open it up immediately in your browser, it also emails it to you, so you have easy access to it afterward.
I think those are the main things I wanted to talk through, so at this point, I’ll open the floor for any questions.
Closing
Awesome — well, thank you again for joining, everybody. If there’s any follow-up questions that might come up, feel free to reach out to us, and we’ll get your answers for you. We hope to see some of you in New Orleans.
Yes, thank you again, everyone — hope you have a great morning, and we’ll follow up with every question individually. Just want to make sure we continue to be in front of you all and make sure you’ve got the right information you need. So, thank you again, everyone — thanks, everyone.