Collaborations for Contractor Management
Collaborations for Contractor Management
By Emery Poulsen
Solution Engineer at Esri
Present-day Contractor Management
Contractor management is a growing need in the natural gas industry. Whether it’s contractors to do landscaping and yard restoration after a job, or contractors to complete inspections and surveys in the field, natural gas utilities need a way to manage contractors and the work that they complete.
Currently, this process is likely manual and time-intensive, relying on people in the field to ensure that their completed work gets into the hands of their supervisor. Additionally, supervisors are manually notified by their crew when works gets completed – if the field personnel remember.
With ArcGIS, contractors can complete work in the field, attach photos, and have all information available to be accessed within their organization immediately. But how can the gas utility access that information?
Previously, in order to share information between different companies or organizations, it was necessary to do manual pushes of static data to bypass the firewall. Esri created a seamless solution for this problem – collaborations. As a natural gas utility, collaborations will allow your contractors to seamlessly share information about their activities in the field - this keeps you up-to-date and informed on the work that your contractors are doing, just seconds after they complete it, while maintaining security and data cleanliness.
Managing Your Contractors with ArcGIS
Collaborations are a way for multiple companies or organizations to share a subset of their geographic information between their ArcGIS Online or Enterprise Portals. Collaborations allow for the sharing of a variety of different content and item types between organizations – these include web apps, maps, scenes, layers and views, imagery layers, files, and Insights items. Additionally, no additional knowledge or skillsets are required to set up a collaboration - the functionality is built into ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online.
By taking advantage of Esri’s services-based architecture, gas utilities can work much more closely with their contractors to keep tabs on operations and keep track of work more intelligently. This ensures that your utility stays in compliance and can continue to provide reliable service to your customers.
Some Key Terms for Understanding Collaborations
There are two types of collaborations – partnered and distributed.
Partnered collaborations only involve ArcGIS Online organizations – here are a few patterns of use.
An example for how to use partnered collaborations would be sharing asset data through your utility’s ArcGIS Online with the local fire department’s ArcGIS Online during an ongoing wildfire.
On the other hand, distributed collaborations are collaborations that involve an Enterprise organization. This can mean multiple Enterprise organizations, or one Enterprise and one ArcGIS Online. Below are a few potential patterns of use – the diagram on the far right could represent your utility’s Enterprise organization sharing asset location information with other Enterprise organizations (like the local police department, fire department, city government, etc.)
Distributed collaborations are commonly used among natural gas utilities to share information between their Enterprise and their ArcGIS Online, as in the diagram on the far left. This could look like anything from resilience monitoring to having a continuous stream of audits from your ArcGIS Online into your Enterprise.
There are a few other concepts to know within the collaborations space – workspaces and access modes.
A workspace is a conceptual space that represents a project, an initiative, or another organizing principle. For example, you might create a collaboration with a contractor that does various kinds of work for your utility – within that collaboration, you’d create different workspaces for each kind of work (Yard Restoration, Leak Survey, etc.) to keep things organized. Each workspace has a single group associated with it within all organizations participating in the collaboration. The diagram below shows an example of a workspace with four participants in it – this could represent your utility and three contractors who are all surveying for leaks, for example.
The first scenario is an example of how your utility could manage construction contractors. In this scenario, a distributed collaboration exists between your utility’s Enterprise organization and your utility’s ArcGIS Online organization. Within the ArcGIS Online organization, there is a separate group for each construction contracting company. There is one map that’s shared with all contractors for easy management for your utility. For information security, there are definition queries in place on the layers within that singular shared web map, with the goal to restrict the content to only the construction projects assigned to each respective contractor. In this scenario, the admins at your utility retain full control of logins and access to the data.
The second scenario is an example of how your utility could manage locating contractors. In this scenario, a partnered collaboration exists between your utility’s ArcGIS Online organization and the contracting company’s ArcGIS Online organization. In this case, the administrators at each contracting company will be responsible for managing the logins and licensing within their own ArcGIS Online organization, and the contractors’ access to your data would be read-only.
Why Collaborations?
Deciding the right path forward for your utility depends on a number of factors, including the type of access to the data required by the contractors, the placement of the responsibility of managing logins and licensing, and familiarity with ArcGIS that each contractor has.
See the chart below for a summary of the differences between partnered and distributed collaborations.
The chart above mentions two-way editing – two-way editing is a way to share data between two organizations, have the ability to edit data belonging to another organization within that collaboration, and then share those changes between the organizations. Two-way editing is only available in distributed collaboration, as the chart above mentions. As a natural gas utility, two-way editing could be used in a collaboration with the contracting organization in which corrections could be made to submitted inspections. Just as a reminder, two-way editing is optional and permissions can be managed as needed.
Collaborations allow for the seamless sharing of data between different Enterprise and ArcGIS Online organizations, allowing your contractors to share data from the field almost instantly after it’s generated.
Managing the work of contractors just got a whole lot easier with collaborations.
For any questions about technical capabilities of collaborations or best practices related to contractor management with collaborations, don’t hesitate to reach out to me at epoulsen@esri.com. Thanks for reading!
PLEASE NOTE: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent Esri’s position, strategies, or opinions.
