Jemez Mountains Electric Co-op Inc. (Hernandez, New Mexicao, U.S.) and Mecklenburg Electric Cooperative (Chase City, Virginia, U.S.) have chosen to implement the StakeOut software system from MiniMax Corp. (St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.) to automate work-order processes, reduce workload, and improve data storage and accuracy.

Jemez Mountains, which serves more than 25,000 meters, will be the first cooperative in New Mexico to use StakeOut. Raphael de la Torre, Jemez Mountains' director of engineering and operations, said, “Currently, we stake a job in the field, put it on paper in the office, and then go back out to the field to GPS it. We plan to cut our workload by two-thirds using StakeOut.”

Jemez Mountains Cooperative will integrate StakeOut with its existing systems, which include an ESRI-based mapping system, Milsoft WindMil for engineering analysis, Milsoft DiSPatch outage-management system, and a South Eastern Data Cooperative accounting system.

In addition to the more immediate cost savings, De la Torre says that using StakeOut is a long-term investment for the cooperative in terms of data storage. “Jemez Mountains Cooperative is 53 years old, and we have too many years worth of staking sheets just lying around our headquarters. We will now be able to get everything in a database format that will benefit our engineers 15 or 20 years from now. You can't place a monetary value on that.”

Mecklenburg Electric Cooperative, which serves 27,000 members in southern Virginia, selected StakeOut after analyzing its current work-order system in a Joint Application Design study with MiniMax.

Mecklenburg plans to integrate StakeOut with its internally developed CIS system and with its AutoCad-based mapping system. The company predicts its greatest cost savings will come from automating its mapping process with the added advantaged of having more accurate and up-to-date maps.
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