Gasunie has been active in the German market since July 2008. When Gasunie took over the operation of BEB’s transport network, the IT infrastructure for geospatial data was strategically developed. Using the Smallworld GIS and the pipeline application, data integration was promoted, and more business processes could be managed within the IT system.
Gasunie’s requirements for the management of pipeline construction projects pointed the company towards GEOMAGIC’s right-of-way management application LaRA. LaRA holds both Gasunie data and German official land register data in the form of the automated real estate book (ALB). The official land register data is being used to establish a link to the Smallworld GIS and to the cadastral data of the automated real estate map (ALK).
Data from in-line inspections of about 3,600 km of piggable pipelines was integrated into the GIS, opening up the way for managing pipeline integrity business processes in the unified IT environment.Since 2012, Gasunie has been using GEOMAGIC’s trascue.PIMS infrastructure, which provides comprehensive condition and risk assessment using the assessment algorithm defined by Gasunie. The location data for large parts of the gas transmission network was improved for use in pipeline integrity management by conducting land surveys and using IMU pigs.
In a further step, data from CP close interval surveys will also be integrated into the IT environment.
“By integrating data from different sources into a unified system, we get an overview of our network’s situation and can analyze all the data together. This is an important benefit of our current IT environment,” explains Dirk Vahlbruch, GIS project manager at Gasunie Deutschland.
The work management suite GeoNAM played an important part in creating acceptance for the integration of various business processes. In a first step, GeoNAM was introduced as a web-based network information system for 60 users. The second step was last year’s successful addition of the GeoNAM Dig Requests module for managing dig requests.
“GeoNAM has really improved the acceptance of GIS-related products in our company. On the one hand, it provides quick and easy access to the data. On the other hand, the Dig Request module has significantly improved our working speed,” says Dr. Klaudia Lohmann, IT executive and project manager at Gasunie Deutschland, who has been GEOMAGIC’s partner since 2011 and is already planning joint projects for the year to come.
Looking back on four years of successful cooperation with Gasunie Deutschland, Jens Focke, Head of Sales at GEOMAGIC, says: “With our latest joint project, we have again demonstrated that our strategy of developing targeted, market-specific software products and creating synergy effects for related projects is the right way to go for meeting pipeline operators’ requirements for their IT environments.”