National Grid plc is one of the largest investor-owned energy companies in the world. It delivers energy to millions of homes and businesses across Great Britain.

For National Grid, accurately pinpointing people, properties and infrastructure is essential in order to run a safe network and deliver responsive customer service. But within its UK Gas Distribution business, maintaining reliable location information was challenging. The staff – from engineers, to customer service operatives, to asset managers – relied on a variety of systems to do their job. More challenging still, each system used different sources of address data, referenced and searched in different ways.

This gave rise to a number of problems. “Inaccuracies would often creep in across different systems,” says John Turner, Project Manager for National Grid. “Some addresses might be spelled incorrectly or recorded differently in different databases. This added time and risk to our work, which – especially for our emergency response activities – we simply couldn’t afford.”

To enhance safety, increase efficiency and boost regulatory performance, National Grid decided to tackle this problem as part of its ambitious Gas Distribution Transformation Programme. This saw the company reduce its business systems from forty to just four – one of which was a Geographic Information System (GIS) from Esri UK.

Built into this system was Esri UK’s innovative LocatorHub solution.

LocatorHub is a powerful location management solution. It gives utilities centralised access to any datasets, from public data such as Ordnance Survey, to their own sets of addresses, roads, network assets and vulnerable customers. This creates a ‘single point of truth’ for all location information in the business.

Importantly, the system constantly cleanses address data, correcting inaccuracies and removing duplicates. It gives every location a set of coordinates, for pinpoint accuracy. And it’s very easy to use; users can search for information using xy coordinates, standard address formats, asset addresses and includes fuzzy matching.

LocatorHub can also be embedded into applications. At National Grid, it is built into the Esri desktop and integrated into all key business applications – from the CRM system to its SAP plant maintenance application – putting reliable location information at the heart of business processes.

As soon as LocatorHub was populated, John and his team cleansed their data to ensure all records were accurate. “We verified 22 million addresses provided by Xoserve to be able to link vulnerable customer and meter information with our LocatorHub addresses. We also cleaned our asset location data, and gave xy coordinates to everything in the system, creating a highly accurate, centralised set of data for use across the business.”

National Grid has completed 1.5m jobs in the last 12 months using LocatorHub to identify properties or gas sites, and verified more than 60,000 gas site locations.

The business now has one point of reference for all activities at a site. “That includes all jobs we’ve carried out, and a full customer history. We can even centrally log details of all people related to a particular site, from landowners to occupiers and their agents.” explains John.

“This helps our engineers deliver better service. And it’s easier to get the business intelligence to make more informed strategic decisions.”

LocatorHub also helps National Grid respond quickly to emergency call-outs. As the organisation responsible for the UK-wide National Gas Emergency Service, this is business-critical. “We are targeted by Ofgem to respond to uncontrolled leaks within 1 hour,” explains John. “This can be challenging, especially when people report smelling gas at places without an address, such as a field or a canal bank.

“LocatorHub lets our call centre team position a map to mark the xy coordinates of a potential leak. This can save our engineers minutes or even hours in locating the leak, which is vital for protecting the public.”

When it comes to incident investigation, LocatorHub offers impressive time savings. Investigation requires a lot of information – from a site’s repair history, to recent activities at nearby premises. “Previously, collating information about an incident could take several weeks. But with LocatorHub, we can identify premise and job history in less than a day,” John confirms.

Of course, address data is always changing. But now that LocatorHub is in place, National Grid has a way to manage this efficiently. “If a site doesn’t exist in our systems – perhaps it’s a new-build – LocatorHub lets us add a temporary location, so we can continue with our work until we validate it,” he says.

John believes LocatorHub will be a key part of National Grid operations for many years to come. “LocatorHub enables us to manage the address lifecycle, from plot all the way through to demolition. That’s absolutely fundamental to the work we do, but we would never be able to handle it on our own. The Esri system is a core part of our business.”

EE is the UK’s largest communications company, providing mobile and fixed-broadband communications services to more than 27 million customers through the Orange and T-Mobile brands. The company employs more than 15,000 people and operates over 720 retail stores across the UK.

EE knows the importance of listening to what its customers want in order to deliver the best services. But following the merger of Orange and T-Mobile, the new business found it a challenge to get insight into its customer data. “We had an awful lot of information about our subscribers and their mobile usage, and the volume of data was growing all the time. We were struggling to use it effectively to understand the full customer journey,” says Jen Wells, Multi Channel Geographic Development and Reporting Manager for EE. “Very early on, we realised we needed a way to understand which data was valuable, plus a way to draw insight from it and share it around the organisation. We wanted smarter analytics that would help us learn more about our customers and make informed decisions about how to meet their needs.”

For EE, using GIS to get this insight was the most obvious solution. “We knew we wanted to use GIS because of the visual way it presents data,” says Wells. “What we didn’t know was which technology would be best for us.”

EE compared technology from a number of GIS providers. Based on the findings, the company provisionally chose ArcGIS 10 for Desktop from Esri UK. “It was clear why Esri is the market leader. Its GIS solution has greater capability and functionality than any of the others we looked at.”

However, it wasn’t just the technology that was important to EE. Training was also an important element of the solution, to help the business get the most out of its investment. Before committing to a purchase, Wells discussed the training options with her Esri UK account manager. “Seeing as I’d never used GIS technology before, he recommended that I attend ArcGIS for Desktop Part 1, a two-day training course that covers the basics of the technology. He also explained we could work together to develop a bespoke training plan that would help me tackle each stage of our customer data analysis with the right support. We opted for five sessions, spread out over the course of a year.”

“I was impressed with this tailored approach. I felt confident that the technology and training package was the best option for our business.”

Today, EE is successfully using the GIS to get new customer insight. “We’ve made good progress thanks to Esri UK. I now have the knowledge to experiment with the software and to set up my own models,” Jen confirms. “And we’re constantly reassessing how we use the technology, to be sure we get the most out of it.”

“Other areas of the business are now using the GIS, and people are very excited about what the technology can do. They love the way it helps them to visualise what’s happening around the country. Over the past year, the GIS has become part of our daily vocabulary.”

Wells has also found the ArcGIS 10 for Desktop Part 1 course to be very valuable. “It showed me what I needed to know to get started with the software straight away. It also gave me the knowledge to get the most out of my bespoke training programme from day one.”

Wells now plans to attend training on ArcGIS Spatial Analyst and ModelBuilder. “As the Esri tool has so many capabilities, I think that the training, particularly the bespoke training, is very worthwhile. The training we developed with Esri UK was very tailored to our needs.”