Author: SBS

Reimagining how design work is done across a large organization

Dominion Energy, headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, is one of the largest electric utilities in the United States, serving over 2.7 million customers across Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Pennsylvania. With 60,000 miles of electric distribution lines and a system that’s 99% smart-meter enabled, Dominion operates at a scale that demands efficiency, accuracy, and adaptability. Facing the limitations of legacy design tools, the company launched a major initiative to modernize its electric distribution design workflow. The goal: to increase productivity, streamline processes, and prepare the organization for deeper integration with GIS and enterprise asset management systems.

To lead this transformation, Dominion selected Automated Utility Design (AUD) from SBS, bringing in a modern, model-based design environment to replace its legacy ArcFM Designer system. What followed was an ambitious, multi-state implementation that reimagined how design work is done across the organization from headquarters to privatized military base operations.

Building the Foundation for Change

“Most of our designers weren’t used to working in a CAD environment,” said John Terpay, Design Engineering Supervisor at Dominion Energy. “They were GIS designers. But with AUD, we saw an opportunity to introduce automation and consistency in ways that weren’t possible before.”

The AUD deployment covered 35 offices for both internal teams and design vendors, and drew in more than 30 dedicated project contributors across IT, GIS, standards, training, and design operations. Dominion developed a phased rollout plan, targeting subdivision design teams for early training and scheduling 30 comprehensive courses to support the transition.

Harry Canaday, Business Systems Analyst at Dominion Energy, noted that configuration was central to the implementation’s success. “We were able to structure the tool around our workflows, not the other way around. That’s huge. AUD let us tailor the interface so designers could move from primary to service connections in a logical, top-down flow. That’s what made adoption realistic.”

Automation That Delivers

One of the most immediate wins came from automation. Previously, placing a single pole with associated hardware and labor components could take 10–15 minutes using Dominion’s legacy tools. Now, it takes one click.

“AUD automatically places the pole, cross arms, insulators, tie wire, and everything else the designer needs,” said Canaday. “That alone is going to save us enormous time. And the designers are excited about that.”

SBS also worked with Dominion to configure advanced features like:

• A grid reservation tool for GIS integration
• Custom annotation tools that meet strict internal standards
• Support for SpidaCALC integration to streamline engineering analysis
• Pre-loaded design details for underground facilities that previously required manual drafting

All of this contributes to faster, more reliable construction packages with reduced errors, rework, and field miscommunication.

A True Partnership

“Once we started working with SBS, it was clear they knew utilities. They understood our problems without us having to explain every detail. They felt like an extension of our team. Everyone we’ve worked with has been very professional; responsive, knowledgeable, and passionate,” said Terpay. “I don’t think of them as a vendor anymore.”

Canaday echoed the sentiment. “The way AUD functions in a design environment, it’s friendly, logical, and easy to learn. SBS made sure we weren’t just buying software; we were getting a solution tailored to how we actually work.”

Preparing for the Future

As Dominion moves toward full AUD adoption, several key transitions lie ahead. The company plans to integrate AUD with SAP and implement a two-way data exchange with its GIS, eventually migrating to the Esri Utility Network model. “We’re thinking long-term,” said Terpay. “We want our designs to feed reliable, detailed data back to GIS, and vice versa.”

For Dominion Energy, AUD is more than just a new tool, it’s the foundation for a more efficient, accurate, and forward-looking design environment. The utility is already seeing improvements in design cycle times and anticipates stronger integration across systems as the rollout progresses.

“We’ve learned a lot,” said Terpay. “This isn’t just about replacing software. It’s about building a better way to work. And with SBS, we have the right partner to make that happen.”

Changing design workflows to be streamlined, scalable, and integrated.

Overview

Idaho Power, a utility serving over 630,000 customers in Idaho and Oregon, is undertaking a significant modernization of its electric distribution design workflows. Through a phased implementation of Automated Utility Design (AUD) from SBS, the company is moving away from decades of heavily customized legacy systems to a streamlined, scalable, and integrated design environment.

The Challenge

For years, Idaho Power relied on a highly customized software. While it served critical design functions, the environment became increasingly complex to maintain. Extensive custom code, redundant workflows, and outdated integrations created technical risk and inefficiencies across design, GIS, and asset systems.

“We have a ton of custom code that we’ve developed over the last 25-plus years that we need to eliminate,” said Melissa Peterson, AUD Technical Support Analyst at Idaho Power. “Our goal is to modernize and improve the timeliness and accuracy of design data, reduce redundancy, and remove dependencies on external applications.”

At the same time, Idaho Power launched a broader effort to upgrade core systems including GIS, OMS, and CIS, creating an opportunity to reimagine design processes as part of a unified enterprise approach.

The Solution

Idaho Power partnered with SBS and Power Engineers to implement AUD. Phase one, deployed in December 2024, integrates AUD with their existing GIS geometric network. Phase two, set for completion in late 2025, will align with Esri’s Utility Network.

“We’re replacing heavy customization with out-of-the-box configuration,” said Peterson. “This is a very brownfield implementation, and we’re trying to align all of our systems with minimal custom code so we can improve maintainability and scalability.”

“We’re in the build and configuration phase right now,” added Brian Graham, AUD System Administrator. “We support around 180 designers across the company. All of our distribution design teams will move to AUD.”

The updated system includes capabilities for automated material ordering, improved integration with enterprise asset management systems, and more intuitive user interfaces that reduce reliance on manual processes.

Benefits and Early Impact

Idaho Power anticipates significant operational improvements:

• Elimination of legacy technical debt
• Reduction in manual data entry and redundant workflows
• Improved accuracy and consistency across design and GIS systems
• Increased efficiency for designers and support teams

“A majority of the designers are excited. They’re not going to have to do as much manual stuff as they do today,” Peterson said. “But we do have a handful of designers struggling to get on board. That’s where strong change management comes in.”

A Ground-Up Change Management Approach

Recognizing the cultural shift that comes with new tools, Idaho Power prioritized user engagement from the outset. Designers, technical advisors, and the methods and materials team were all brought into the configuration process early to shape the system around operational needs.

“We’ve really made a concerted effort to focus on operational change management,” Graham explained. “It hasn’t been top-down, it’s been very ground-up.”

This strategy is helping the team transition from long-standing habits to modern digital workflows.

Next Steps

In phase two, Idaho Power will integrate with the Esri Utility Network, completing the transition to a fully modernized, model-based design environment. While legacy playback and as-built workflows remain, SBS’s integration tools provide a foundation for streamlining those processes in the future.

“We’re trying to figure out how to handle pre-build and as-built without a lot of manual rework,” Peterson said. “We’re confident the integration will help us get there.”

AUD has become central to design work at SCE, enabling standardization, automation, and more responsive user support.

Southern California Edison (SCE), one of the largest electric utilities in the United States, supports a vast and diverse territory across 50,000 square miles. To streamline its design workflows and better support its distributed workforce, SCE turned to Automated Utility Design (AUD) from SBS.

Today, SCE has approximately 1,100 AUD users across internal teams and contractors, including over 400 planners, over 250 designers, and nearly 400 contractor users.

“Instead of just fixing the problems and being very reactive to situations, we’re now able to be more proactive. We’re able to do more training for our end users and support them more accurately and more quickly when they need help.” – Peggy Francis, Manager, Programs & Systems

Incremental Rollouts and Continuous Improvement

As a long time AUD user, the design program has continued to evolve, with regular updates to introduce enhancements. In 2024, SCE completed three new configuration releases, including a release solely focused on transmission design.

“As we are updating or releasing new builds, we’re making sure we have the latest AUD version. This is to prevent the 10-year gap we had prior to our design software refresh project.” – Marvi Dominguez, Sr. Specialist, Programs & Systems

Scalable Support with Internal Tools and Training

To manage a large and growing user base, SCE developed a structured support system around AUD, including:

• Bi-monthly “AUD Power Hour” live training sessions
• Site visits and proactive outreach
• Written job aids and a growing library of video tutorials
• A SharePoint-hosted OneNote knowledge base accessible across internal and contractor teams

“We are developing training and resource materials for our users… As we’re going through our support tickets, we are creating more job aids or even revising the existing ones if it needs more clarification.” – Marvi Dominguez, Sr. Specialist, Programs & Systems

The Impact of Shared Knowledge

The Team AUD SharePoint notebook has become one of the most impactful support tools. With over 800 members, it helps reduce ticket volume by enabling users to help themselves and each other.

“This is a living document, meaning it’s constantly updated almost daily… Users help themselves and help each other across the company and with the contractors. This reduces troubleshooting time.” – Marvi Dominguez, Sr. Specialist, Programs & Systems

Lessons for Other Utilities

SCE’s success with AUD showcases the importance of pairing robust tools with a thoughtful deployment and support strategy. By empowering internal teams, investing in user training, and cultivating knowledge sharing, SCE has transformed AUD into a scalable platform for modern utility design.

Saving over $66M in design costs by Standardizing design and accelerating delivery to meet wildfire mitigation goals

Overview
Faced with the challenge of undergrounding 10,000 miles of electric distribution infrastructure to reduce wildfire risk, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) knew that traditional design processes wouldn’t scale. To meet its ambitious goals, PG&E implemented Automated Utility Design (AUD). This enabled a streamlined, standardized, and model-based design approach that accelerates projects and reduces capital costs.

Challenge
Historically, PG&E’s design process was fragmented and manual. With 13 design centers and over 900 estimators working across different standards and templates, inconsistency and inefficiency were common. This often led to rework, especially as projects moved between regions or teams.

“As long as the design met engineering standards and was constructible, people just did things their own way,” said Gary Parker, Estimating Supervisor at PG&E. “But when one estimator in Fresno is working on a job in Santa Rosa, local requirements can vary and that led to a lot of rework.”

These limitations became more serious as PG&E accelerated its undergrounding efforts. “Before the Camp Fire, we were doing maybe 1–2 miles of electric hardening a year,” said Jaisun Evans, Program Manager at PG&E. “Now we’re designing and installing 400 miles a year, on our way to 1,000. We had to do things differently, and that started with standardization.”

Solution
PG&E engaged with SBS and began deploying AUD, a 2D and 3D digital design and modeling tool integrated with AutoCAD. AUD enables designers to automate manual placements and calculations, apply standards consistently based on a configurable template, and generate construction-ready documentation from a single model.

Estimators in the central design team, helped pilot the system. “AUD automates and standardizes the design process with built-in validation rules to prevent user error,” one Estimator said.

“When materials or equipment are updated in the model, the design updates automatically, saving time and ensuring accuracy.”

Key features of AUD identified by the PG&E team include:

• Automated Material Updates: Changes in design automatically update associated materials, eliminating error-prone, manual tabulation across EES, spreadsheets, and standards.
• All-in-One Drawings: AUD allows designers to apply different stylizations to a single model for schematic and construction drawings. This reduces duplication and translation errors.
• Voltage Drop and Cable Pulling Calculations: Calculations once performed in Excel are now automated, including factors like elevation that spreadsheets cannot compute.
• Automatic Revisions: Minor changes such as transformer relocation automatically update related values, saving hours of manual recalculation.
• Consistent Equipment Labeling and Location Numbering: Labels are auto-generated from model attributes and synchronized across EES and OCalc to maintain quality control.

Implementation Strategy
PG&E focused on a subset of roughly 200 to 300 underground estimators before expanding further.

“We learned from others. If the team’s not ready, a big rollout can backfire,” said Gary Parker. “We’re starting small, building momentum, and bringing in subject matter experts from each office to help lead the way.”

PG&E also laid the groundwork with governance, training, and documentation before implementing AUD. “If we’d tried to jump straight into AUD without standardizing first, we would’ve failed,” said Jaisun Evans.

The team established a CAD committee, published a formal CAD manual, launched monthly training sessions, and created centralized resources on SharePoint. They also instituted a governance process with 30-60-90 percent design phase gates, field validation with survey staked designs, and QC reviews.

Results and Outlook
PG&E is seeing improved consistency, fewer design errors, and a more scalable process for underground design. Since their implementation and subsequent expansion to additional estimators and AEC firms, they have saved more than $66M in real design costs.

The approach has also earned strong support from external engineering partners. “Our AEC firms love the standardized templates,” said Gary Parker.

Looking ahead, PG&E will expand AUD to overhead hardening, subdivisions, and other work types. The company is also enhancing GIS synchronization through tools like Playback Manager and adopting Esri Utility Network and SAP S4HANA.

“This is about more than just software,” said Jaisun Evans. “It’s about rethinking the way we design so we can build safer, more reliable infrastructure faster.”

To support their GIS transformation and meet evolving design needs, Fortis Alberta selected Automated Utility Design (AUD) from SBS to streamline engineering, increase consistency, and integrate with enterprise systems.

Fortis Alberta delivers electricity to more than half a million residential, commercial, and industrial customers across Central and Southern Alberta. Covering a geographically vast and complex service territory, the utility operates approximately 129,000 kilometers of overhead lines and over 1.1 million power poles, representing about 60% of Alberta’s total grid.

The Case for Change

Fortis Alberta’s legacy design tools were no longer supported and lacked smart features or integration. “We had a design tool that doesn’t really have any smarts within it,” said Daniel Plantinga, Senior Design Specialist. “There was always a lack of consistency, duplication of efforts, and minimal integration with SAP or our compatible units.”

The decision to upgrade their GIS to Esri’s Utility Network triggered broader modernization efforts across multiple departments, one of which was design. “This umbrella project has kicked off ten different initiatives, with AUD being a key piece,” added Neel Krishan, Senior Engineer, Standards and Projects.

Evaluating AUD

The Fortis Alberta team worked with consultants to assess potential design tools and reached out to peer utilities for feedback. “When we saw SBS’s customer list, we recognized some sister companies and neighbors,” said Krishan. “We contacted many of them to understand their experiences.”

That outreach helped confirm AUD’s value and SBS’s reputation.

“What stood out wasn’t just the software,” said Plantinga. “It was the relationships. Energy Queensland, for example, said they wished all vendors were like SBS. That kind of feedback made our decision easier.”

Highlights of AUD

The team was especially impressed with AUD’s ability to automate complex calculations and reduce dependence on disconnected tools. “We saw a one-click design that draws your pole, brings in the material with cost, and does analysis like voltage drop and cable pull all in one tool,” said Plantinga. “Today, those are separate processes across multiple systems.”

AUD’s configurability also aligned with Fortis Alberta’s philosophy: “We wanted something configurable, not something we’d have to heavily customize just to do basic things, like display the color orange in CAD,” said Plantinga.

Phased Implementation

Fortis Alberta is taking a phased approach to deployment, starting with a vanilla implementation of AUD in advance of the Esri Utility Network transition. “This gives us time to train our folks and avoid overwhelming the design team with simultaneous changes,” said Krishan.

The team is also exploring engineering integration for Canadian nonlinear structure analysis. “We’re evaluating options like SpidaCALC to perform those calculations outside AUD and bring the results back in,” said Krishan.

Engaging Designers Through Change

A key part of Fortis Alberta’s strategy is involving end users in the process.

“This isn’t just a tool for them, it’s their tool,” said Plantinga. “We’ve been telling our designers: we’re not here to build it for you, we’re building it with you.”

That openness has generated a high volume of feedback. “One lesson we’ve learned is to have a structured intake and prioritization plan,” said Krishan. “The ideas are great but they can be overwhelming if you’re not ready to manage them.”

Looking Ahead

Implementation begins shortly, and Fortis Alberta expects to see major gains in consistency, automation, and communication. “AUD gives us the integrated, modern design platform we need,” said Plantinga. “It helps us build better designs, faster, and support more reliable service for our customers.”

Designing for Tomorrow: A Modern Utility with a Growing Mission

Arizona Public Service (APS), the state’s longest-serving energy provider, serves 1.4 million customers across a wide and varied region, from the border town of Douglas to the solar fields of Gila Bend and the pines of Payson. As APS continued expanding its clean energy initiatives and capital portfolio, it needed a more scalable, standardized way to produce utility designs.

The solution was Automated Utility Design (AUD) from SBS, but what began as a focused GIS integration project quickly evolved into a company-wide transformation.

A Scope That Grew with Complexity

The AUD implementation kicked off in 2019. Initially, the project aimed to integrate AUD with the GIS environment. But in the years that followed, APS encountered shifting priorities, new system upgrades, and emerging opportunities that expanded the scope significantly.

“We originally set out to connect AUD with GIS,” said Naomi Prieto, T&D Engineering and Design Manager at APS. “But the scope expanded as Maximo upgrades came into play, and suddenly we were navigating parallel system overhauls that had to land at the same time.”

By 2023, APS was not only integrating with GIS and Maximo but also rolling out an overhauled compatible units (CU) catalog, updating AutoCAD, and introducing new construction standards.

Phased Rollout, Widespread Impact

The team launched training in April or 2023 and completing the rollout by August. More than 180 internal and contract designers were trained through a phased approach. APS encouraged its engineering service providers to attend training sessions alongside internal staff, helping ensure consistency across all design contributors.

Reinventing the Way APS Designs

The AUD rollout was more than a technical implementation. It also required APS to rethink how it structured and visualized designs. Historically, multiple circuits were represented as single lines in AutoCAD, leading to cluttered and hard-to-interpret designs. While this method worked in the past, it was long overdue for modernization.

“The way we used to design just didn’t work anymore,” said Giles. “We had to rethink everything.”

Working closely with SBS, APS developed a schematic expansion tool that allowed designers to use simplified visual representations in the design while producing GIS-friendly circuit-specific outputs in the background. Designers could configure conduit and conductor details directly in the drawing, with automatic updates applied during schematic expansion.

“SBS literally saved the day with this update,” said Mark Keslar, Designer at APS.

“A cut-in that used to take 15 minutes now takes three. It changed everything for us.”

Supporting Long-Term Adoption

To support users post-deployment, APS established a SharePoint site with categorized guides, walkthrough videos, and searchable designer alerts. This central hub complemented live support channels and helped users quickly find answers during early adoption.

“We used the AUD implementation as an opportunity to standardize our design practices,” said Prieto. “The tool is only as good as the processes behind it, so we focused on aligning our standards with the system as we rolled it out.”

A Foundation for Future Innovation

As APS continues building its internal capacity to administer and enhance AUD, the team reflects on the value of tight collaboration between IT, operations, and vendor teams. The combination of business fluency and technical insight was critical to the rollout’s success.

“We were lucky to have the right mix of people,” said Prieto. “Our project managers from SBS and IT were excellent, and Justin’s knowledge of both the design process and the underlying technology made a huge difference.”

With AUD now in place, APS is better equipped to deliver high-quality designs faster, reduce field rework, and support its evolving energy mission with scalable, intelligent design tools.