Kansas City Power & Light (KCP&L; Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.) is expanding its suite of Intergraph (Huntsville, Alabama, U.S.) field automation tools with a new application for field design sketch. The new technology will enable KCP&L to capture intelligent design information in the field and incorporate it into critical back-office systems like Intergraph's infrastructure management and workforce management solutions. The tool will assist KCP&L crews in their daily field activities, including restoration follow-up, service orders, small design jobs, maintenance orders and others.

The new field design sketch tool is pre-integrated into Intergraph's unified field automation suite. The integrated suite incorporates field engineering applications, outage management and mobile workforce management technology for scheduled work and trouble work into a single mobile application for optimal functionality and cost savings. This solution uses wireless technology to allow real-time connection and updates. And in times when a signal is not available, a store and forward capability allows updates to be queued until connection is re-established. In addition to the field design sketch tool, future functionality will include field inspection, vegetation management and damage assessment.

“As a user of Intergraph's automated mapping/facilities management solutions for utilities for the past several years, we look forward to obtaining the added benefits of the new field design sketch tool,” said Ed Hedges, project manager at KCP&L. “By working closely with Intergraph, we continue to expand the types of work that can be accomplished with the Intergraph geographic information system tools, leading to significant impacts on day-to-day productivity and customer satisfaction.”

In addition to leveraging Intergraph field automation tools, KCP&L also uses Intergraph's design and asset management technology, mobile workforce management application, and data integration and analysis tools.