GIS-driven vegetation management modernization for a North American utility
Executive summary
Infosys modernized large-scale vegetation management for a North American natural gas and electricity provider — standardizing corridor definition, automating field-data ingestion and QA/QC, and reconciling assets across enterprise platforms. The program achieved greater than 99% SLA adherence, reduced outage-restoration time by 12%, and delivered a 30–40% reduction in total cost of ownership.
About the client
A leading North American public utility delivering natural gas and electricity services across a large multi-region network, supporting millions of customers through extensive transmission and distribution infrastructure.
Situation
The utility manages large-scale vegetation programs to protect critical grid infrastructure. However, fragmented GIS ecosystems, manual inspection workflows, and limited automation led to operational inefficiencies, elevated costs, and increased exposure to regulatory and reliability risks.
Key challenges
- Inconsistent spatial governance and corridor definition: Project-corridor creation for transmission and distribution networks lacked standardized validation, resulting in overlaps, inaccurate vegetation-risk zones, and unreliable inspection coverage.
- Manual, fragmented data capture and digitization: Field-inspection data required manual logging and map updates, causing delays, higher effort, reduced data accuracy, and limited timely decision-making.
- Disparate systems and data-integrity gaps: A lack of synchronization across enterprise platforms (Salesforce, ArcGIS Online, GIS databases, and field tools) created inconsistencies that complicated asset tracking and vegetation-conflict analysis.
- Dynamic network changes without scalable update mechanisms: Frequent span additions, removals, and realignments across regions, combined with manual GIS updates, resulted in low productivity and inconsistent data quality.
- Limited automation in compliance and validation: The absence of structured validation, testing, and automated reporting increased the risk of non-compliance and audit challenges while promoting reactive maintenance practices.
The solution
A GIS-led transformation that standardized corridors and automated field workflows to improve grid resilience
Infosys implemented a GIS-led transformation to modernize vegetation management and improve grid resilience:
- Established standardized project-corridor creation and validation frameworks for transmission and distribution circuits
- Enabled GIS-driven vegetation segmentation and conflict detection to support proactive risk mitigation
- Automated field-data ingestion and transcription through structured data pipelines
- Implemented bulk attribute-update mechanisms to streamline span and asset management
- Introduced automated QA/QC workflows for data validation, cleansing, and consistency enforcement
- Strengthened asset reconciliation and spatial-integrity checks to enhance GIS accuracy
Benefits
- Achieved greater than 99% SLA adherence and high data-accuracy standards
- Reduced outage-restoration time by 12% through improved data reliability and proactive insights
- Delivered a 30–40% reduction in total cost of ownership via automation and process optimization
- Enhanced grid reliability with uninterrupted power delivery
- Strengthened regulatory compliance through auditable, standardized GIS workflows
