Tips, Tricks, or Ideas for creating Schematic Detail Diagrams for Electric Utility

[JerrodKlug]

There was a recent request to replace our AutoCAD printed Electric Distribution Circuit Books with a GIS printed Book generated from our GIS data.  As there is reluctance to accept anything different from what we currently have in AutoCAD, it is a struggle to duplicate the existing book with the overall maps and details of Manholes, Junctions, Transformers, etc.  Our initial thought is that we could tackle this with a combination of Schematics and Data Driven Pages.  Has anyone had success with this?  We are just breaking the surface of Schematics configuration so any help would be appreciated. 

Thank you in advance!

Jerrod

[RickAnderson]

I am not sure if you have come across it yet or not, but the resources page for Schematics has a lot of training type of content.  That main page is available here.  Once on that page, there is a series of training videos for various needs and functionality.  The main video page is here.  The internals of things is probably the trickiest as far as configuration goes, but there is a tutorial and videos showing an example of how it can be done.

[JerrodKlug]

Thanks Rick.

I've been through the training exercises and videos and have made some strides in the configuration with creating containers, rules, attributes, and generating some diagrams.  I need to be able to generate a diagram to print out and was wondering if there are any samples out there or what algorithms users have had the best luck with.  So far, I've been creating geoschematic diagrams and manually moving things.  I would be interested in any ideas to make this process not so labor intensive as we need to do this with our whole electric system. 
Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Jerrod

[RickAnderson]

Hi Jerrod,

It varies a lot between customers, so it is hard to say what works for you.  The software provides 'generic' layout algorithms that aren't specific to any 1 industry.  If you have a specific layout that has a pattern that can be followed every time, then a developer could build a layout for you that would show up in the list of algorithms.  Our professional services folks do that type of stuff for various customers in various industries to meet their needs.  Other than that you just have to play with various combinations.  The good news is that once it is done, it is done.  We retain that position information.  So just like if you did this in CAD, you have to lay it out 1 time.  On our side though, now you get all the update capability and direct GIS integration.

Rick

[RickAnderson]

We are contemplating doing more industry specific layouts for future releases.  So if you can share what your 'circuit diagrams' look like, that would be helpful for our own on-going analysis.