Redlands, California-August 16, 2010-Northeastern Rural Electric Membership Corporation (REMC) is able to better serve the energy needs of its growing customer base by using mobile geographic information system (GIS) technology from Esri. The consumer-owned utility supplies electric power to more than 26,000 households and businesses in northeastern Indiana.
Northeastern REMC utility linemen once navigated the service territories by memory, armed with a handful of paper maps. Now field crews use laptops equipped with ArcGIS software from Esri to instantly update information related to work orders, regular maintenance, and customers. The GIS data is accessible throughout the company, with approximately 43 users on different devices in several departments.
Steven Weber, Northeastern REMC GIS technician, said, "Using GIS technology, we can deliver the right information to the right hands at the right time. Field crews can view, search, and revise GIS data and use GPS for facility locating and routing. This improves the flow of accurate information from the field to the office to the customers."
Bill Meehan, Esri director of utility solutions, said, "Utilities have struggled for years to move information into and out of the field. It is wonderful to see how Northeastern REMC addressed this problem by empowering field-workers with mobile GIS."
For more information on GIS for electric utilities, visit www.esri.com/electric.
About Esri
Since 1969, Esri has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, Esri software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. Esri applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. Esri is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at www.esri.com/news.