Faster as-built sync
21 days
BlueWave’s GIS team spent every Monday morning chasing as-built drawings that had landed three weeks late. Crews would close out a job in the field, scan a marked-up drawing, and upload it to a contractor portal. Then a GIS technician downloaded each drawing, opened it, manually traced the geometry into ArcGIS, and pushed an update to the asset registry.
The queue ran three weeks behind on a good month, six on a bad one. Work orders dispatched against stale asset data — crews showed up to find equipment that had been replaced or moved. Outage models ran on incorrect topology. Capital planning forecast against a network that didn’t exist.
Two earlier attempts had failed. A consulting firm built a custom workflow that broke whenever the ERP got patched. An RPA vendor proposed bots that couldn’t read the drawings reliably. Both projects ended in more manual work, not less.
Aquifer treated the contractor handoff as a cross-organization connection rather than a file upload. Exchange let contractors push structured as-built data — geometry, attributes, photos — directly into BlueWave’s GIS pipeline without sharing logins or building one-off integrations per contractor.
Inside BlueWave, the Integration Hub kept ArcGIS and the ERP in sync. New assets created in the field appeared in the work-order system within minutes; capital projects reflected the real network state.
Phased rollout over six weeks. The first contractor went live in week two; all 18 went live by week six.
As-built turnaround dropped from 21 days to under one. Work orders dispatch against current data. The asset registry — the system everyone needed to trust and nobody did — is now the single source of truth for distribution operations.
Three months in, the GIS team’s Monday morning queue is empty.
"As-builts used to land in GIS three weeks late. Now they land the day the contractor closes them. The work-order pipeline finally trusts the map."