Category: SBS Blog

SBS will be showcasing our newest products at Booth #1906. Come learn how our intelligent design solutions can add tremendous value to your projects. Check out our newest product Substation Design Suite™ – Physical for AutoCAD®. 

Esri UC is the world’s largest GIS conference and connects partners like SBS with users to share our GIS solutions and products. SBS will be highlighting our intelligent design solutions integrated with ArcGIS and Utility Network along with some other exciting new developments.

Littleton, Colorado

June 1, 2022

SDS Physical for Inventor Version 8.1 provides support for Autodesk Inventor 2022 and 2023 as well as database improvements to support centralized data management for IT and CAD administrators.  This new product release also includes several quality improvements.

Organizations that want to learn more about Substation Design Suite can visit www.substationdesignsuite.com or send an email to [email protected].   Existing customers can contact their software administrator to download the latest version from the SBS support portal or contact SBS at [email protected]. 

After two years of virtual conferences, we are excited to gather in person with you for our 9^th Annual Peer Utility Group Conference. Join us live at the beautiful Heritage Eagle Bend Golf Club in Denver, Colorado for this terrific event! Register today to receive early bird pricing. 

Planning is currently underway. Please check back regularly for updates on available sessions and activities. For those unable to attend in person, we will share the link to the livestream. Please contact Taylor Forster with any questions: [email protected].  

Location: Heritage Eagle Bend Golf Club, 23155 E Heritage Pkwy, Aurora, CO 80016 

Dates: August 30 – September 1, 2022 

Join Steve Kaufman from SBS for a webinar on Wednesday, June 1, to learn about electrical design checks with model states in Substation Design Suite™ (SDS) Physical for Inventor.  

The 40-minute webinar will cover subassembly islands with Model States. Learn how to prepare for and run SDS Design Checks with Model States in SDS Physical for Inventor. You will have a chance to ask questions in the Q&A following the discussion.

Title: SDS Design Checks with Model States 

Date: Wednesday, June 1, 2022, at 12:00 PM EST 

Details:  

• Register here. 
• Visit https://www.spatialbiz.com/substation-design-suite/ for more information about Substation Design Suite products. 
• Access the content on the Spatial Business Systems YouTube channel after the event. 

REGISTER FOR THE WEBINAR HERE. 

Wednesday, June 1, 2022 

12:00 PM EST 

Visit the exhibit floor to see what the industry’s leading professionals have to offer. SBS will be hosting Booth #734. Come check out our newest product Substation Design Suite™ – Physical for AutoCAD®. 

DistribuTECH International provides industry leaders the opportunity to network with utilities and product and service providers from all over the world. Learn more about how to address the current demands of the market at the 13-track conference. We hope to see you there! 

May 3, 2022, Littleton, CO.

SBS has launched Substation Design Suite Protection & Control (SDS-P&C) version 8.2. New commands and product enhancements have been added to improve usability and flexibility.

SDS-P&C extends the power of AutoCAD® Electrical to provide advanced electrical substation design capabilities necessary to fully lay out and specify an electric substation. With the latest enhancements in version 8.2, you can now more efficiently produce quality substation protection and control designs. Here are our top five favorite updates:

Surf wiring diagram annotations (SDS_ANNOSURF)

• Easily jump from a picked wiring diagram annotation text string to its listed far-end connection (the remote end of the wire) even if it leads to a different drawing. This new command also lets you surf straight to the wiring diagram annotation’s far-end schematic connection. If there is a related panel front-view or rear-view layout symbol tied to the annotation’s connection, the new tool gives you the option to instantly surf to that too.

Zoom to block troubleshooting tool (SDS_Z2B)

• Troubleshoot block issues more effortlessly with this great new tool. Type in a block name (wildcards supported) to be navigated around the active drawing to find and check every instance of that block used in the active drawing.

Find files (ACEFINDFILE)

• Run this new ACEFINDFILE command and search for the dialog filename that AutoCAD Electrical or SDS is using (e.g., sdtools.dcl) if there are issues finding the correct files (either program support or reference files), or if you’re checking to ensure the program is finding the right block or library symbol. If the search finds the old filename instead of the new one in the new install’s folder, you’ve identified the problem.

Clean up Master/Reference-Only copies (SDS_UTIL_REFONLY_CLEAN)

• Use this tool to assign a new GUID to a copied set of symbols if you have standards or standard circuits with embedded Master/Reference-Only links in them that you want to copy or instantiate. Simply window and copy a linked set of symbols and then run this tool and window-select the newly copied symbols. The tool assigns a new, shared GUID to the copied Master and Reference-Only pair, preserving the integrity of both the original pair and the copied pair. This tool can also help clean up any Master/Reference-Only linkages created by mistake.

Enhanced flexibility with 1-Line Relay Editor tool, Wiring Diagram Annotation, Rollover tool, Job/WO Toolset

• Find enhanced support for transformer internal protection bubble option display in the 1-Line Relay Editor tool.
• View cleaner wiring diagram annotations with the new Wiring Diagram Annotation update. A checkbox at the bottom of the dialog box also allows companies to automatically run their own custom, post-process lisp file. This optional file will run automatically right before wiring diagram annotations are pushed to symbols.
• View graphical “chicken tracks” between a rolled-over schematic cable fan-in label and its linked schematic wires with the Rollover tool. It more clearly displays links between on-drawing Source/Destination arrows and provides an option for users to add additional attribute/value combinations in the Surfer display. The Rollover tool has also been improved to assist troubleshooting by highlighting any overridden annotation strings.
• Manually draw a revcloud and assign it a Job/WO and status combination, allowing manually drawn or selected revclouds to be used within the rest of the Job/WO toolset.

We hope you enjoy these new updates as much as we do. If you’re interested in learning more about SDS-P&C, please contact us at [email protected]. Click here to download the newest version.

More and more utilities have successfully implemented Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology. Learn from their experiences as you consider how making this change can benefit your organization in providing safe and reliable service and bring a greater return on investment. 

Trevor Scullion of SBS and other panelists will not only discuss the benefits to your organization but will also address the most common challenges faced in implementing this new technology including new software needs and change management issues. 

Title: Implementation of Building Information Modeling Technology: Changing the Game for Substation Design (Session Number PN05) 

Date: Tuesday, April 26, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM  

Location: Room 292, Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, New Orleans 

Panelists:  

• Don Sanders of Ameren 
• Ronald Wellman of AEP 
• Bill Gordon of Southern Company 
• Jack Hopson of Autodesk 
• Trevor Scullion of SBS 

Register Today

Tuesday, April 26, 2022  

10:00 AM – 12:00 PM CDT 

Gather in person with other leading utility providers at the Engineering & Operations Conference and Trade Show to share and learn how to survive, thrive, and forge ahead through natural disasters and local and global calamities. 

SBS will be hosting Booth #525 at the Trade Show. Come connect with us and check out our newest products. 

Title: NWPPA Engineering & Operations Conference and Trade Show

Date: April 12 – 14, 2022

Details:

• Register and learn more about the conference here.
• Stop by the SBS Booth #525.
• Visit us at Spokane Convention Center in Spokane, WA.

REGISTER FOR THE EXHIBITION HERE. 

Tuesday, April 12 – Thursday, April 14, 2022 

Intelligent Infrastructure Design for Utilities (Part 2 of 3)

Dennis F. Beck, PE, President/CEO, SBS

In Part 1 of this series we defined the key elements of intelligent design solutions and introduced how they can support improved workflows within utility organizations. Intelligent design combines advanced asset modeling, support for integrated engineering and standards, and support for configurable enterprise integration. This is in contrast from traditional design tools that can range from manual drawings, sketch-based tools, and two-dimensional CAD or GIS-based design tools.

This article first attempts to identify common issues that utility organizations experience that lead to justifying an intelligent design system. It then gets into some examples of benefits that utility organizations experience by using intelligent design solutions. Many of the details have been provided by members of the SBS Peer Utility Group (PUG), an organization of utilities that meets on an annual basis to share experiences in utility design automation. The PUG has met for over five years now, and we have noticed common patterns emerging in terms of benefits attained. This article attempts to share some of these findings.

Common Issues | How to Know that You Have Problems

Before we can identify the benefits necessary to justify an intelligent design system, it is important to understand the common issues in manual, semi-manual, or non-integrated design solutions. They tend to fall into the categories of general inefficiencies, operational shortcomings, and issues related to information management.

General Inefficiencies:

• Design inefficiency. Designs are often performed with limited information, such as missing field conditions, incomplete or inaccurate base maps, and a lack of detailed engineering properties. Design engineers often do not have the tools or information in place to enable them to perform proper engineering.

• Information and system sharing issues. Designers need to go back and forth from work management to design tools to spreadsheets and materials management systems in order to complete their designs, causing a large loss of efficiency and a need to learn multiple system

• Construction inefficiencies. A lack of good information to facilitate site analysis, inconsistent design standards, materials management issues, field changes, and quality issues due to incomplete or inaccurate designs create inefficiencies in the construction process.

• Manual data entry and re-entry. The most prevalent problem we have noticed has been the need to redraw information multiple times into the target systems, which not only takes time, but slows down the flow of information necessary to operate systems. This also impacts safety and the ability to readily gather critical information on a timely basis, a requirement that is increasingly necessary for regulatory requirements as well as advanced utility applications such as ADMS.

Operational Shortcomings:

• Poor information sharing. This operational shortcoming can range from slowdowns in approval processes to safety issues caused by not making critical information available to project and operations stakeholders.

• Materials management issues. These issues occur due to lack of accurate bills of materials and a lack of standards, which causes a wide range of issues with materials warehousing and supply chain management.

• Lack of compliance. Risks related to lack of compliance are caused by a lack of design standard enforcement, a lack of design details, and an overall inconsistency across the organization.

Information Management:

• Safety issues and close calls due to uncoordinated work, records out of date, and broken as-built workflows.
• Customer service issues due to lack of available information or responsiveness.
• Generally poor information quality, including out of date network representations that are needed to support advanced technologies.
• Inability to support new applications due to out-of-date information.
• Lack of data to enable future asset management initiatives.
• Outdated systems that are not upgradeable due to custom developments that are costly to upgrade.  The upgrades can sometimes cost more than the original installation. 
• Poor system performance, typically caused by custom, out-of-date systems. 

Discovering the Benefits

Our understanding of benefits from this next generation of design tools continues to advance as more and more utility organizations adopt the intelligent design paradigm. While there are benefits across the entire asset lifecycle, this article will focus on three main areas:

• Design and workflow efficiencies
• Construction improvements
• Better information for advanced applications

Design and Workflow Efficiencies

In model-The most quantifiable benefits for intelligent design solutions are centered around improvements in design and workflow efficiency improvements. These are inherently driven by the foundations of intelligent design—model-based design, advanced integration, and application improvements. Here are some of the key benefits:

• Improved information access. Integrated solutions such as Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and GIS provide the necessary information to access key applications within engineering design and construction workflows.  EAM makes work orders and compatible units available without having to leave the design tool. GIS can be accessed via service-based integration to provide necessary background data, current asset representations, and various forms of analysis to support design.

• Engineering automation. Model-based representations of utility assets enable the automation of common engineering design functions, including 3D asset representations necessary for performing line sag analysis, structural analysis, and underground modeling of conduit to support pulling tension and clearance analyses. 

• Reduced manual data entry and redrawing. Data redrawing has been a common problem at utilities for decades stemming from the need to have a richer, more accurate set of information to support design. This is often in contrast to the GIS user, who often can benefit from less-detailed information to support safe and timely operations activities.  Intelligent, model-based representations of utility assets allow organizations to present and share this information with different user personas without having to go through redrawing operations, which provides more timely information to support new applications. 

It is not uncommon for organizations that implement intelligent design to achieve a twenty percent or greater improvement in design productivity. Some organizations have achieved significantly more. One SBS client has reported a savings of approximately 6000 hours per year just by reducing data entry for materials lists. For an example of a distribution utility organization’s experience, please read “Integrated Design Is More Efficient” on the SBS blog.  For an example of substation protection and control design efficiency improvements, please refer to “The Value of Intelligent Substation Design – A Perspective of Three Utilities.” 

For most organizations, the payback period for design efficiency improvements tend to justify the expenditure for an intelligent design system.  Our SBS intelligent design solution customers have experienced a payback period ranging from eight to twenty-four months.  It is important to look beyond the efficiency improvements, however, as there is significant, more strategic value that intelligent design offers to utility organizations. 

Construction Improvements

One of the important realizations of intelligent design is that designs are not only more efficient, but they offer higher quality, which can translate into significant benefits when the design moves into the construction process. This is driven, once again, by having rich models with 3D representations working in conjunction with the information necessary to drive better decisions. Here are a few examples:

• Design quality. 3D designs offer inherently better quality. Having the accurate 3D representation allows organizations to perform better analysis for things such as clearance checking and constructability. This in turn makes construction safer and more efficient while reducing costly field changes that impact not only the project cost, but also the project schedule. Schedule impacts can often be more costly to the utility shareholders than cost overruns. 

• Better materials management. Intelligent design supports better materials management in several ways. The properly defined asset models can be used to drive the designs to a high-level of standardization, which reduces the extensive amount of one-off compatible units that some utility organizations will stock within their inventories. These kinds of improvements can offer tremendous savings throughout the supply chain of a utility. Better materials management also serves to ensure that construction is more standardized, improving build efficiency. Auto-generation of an accurate, sufficiently detailed bill of materials ensures that the right materials are used on the construction project without having to improvise in the field.

• Detailed models. Having a sufficiently detailed model that can be viewed in 3D also ensures that the review cycle can be performed by a broad audience of stakeholders who need to approve projects. These stakeholders often do not have the engineering skills to sort through stacks of dozens or perhaps hundreds of 2D design documents to discern what is being built. Visualization of a 3D model within a web-based viewing tool opens up the review cycle to timely reviews and approvals from all stakeholders, reducing the risk of having to make costly field changes once construction has started.

• Information sharing. The ability to share this information during the construction process enables the use of BIM-based applications to support requests for information (RFIs) from the field, which speeds up the field change process, once again reducing the cycle for field changes. Other BIM capabilities include visual project management of construction progress and improved construction analytics.

Intelligent design solution users are in the earlier stages of generating construction benefits as they move to more and more digital construction workflows. For further examples of the significant benefits utility organizations have achieved during the construction phase, please refer to the blogpost “The Value of Intelligent Substation Design – A Perspective of Three Utilities.” Of particular note is the improvement in reducing field change orders due to higher design quality.

Better Information for Advanced Applications

While the sections above list benefits that can be readily quantified to justify an investment in intelligent design solutions, this section offers some strategic reasons for moving forward with intelligent design. The primary strategic benefits involve the ability to gather and share information related to asset lifecycles starting with the initial design. This information then supports a wide variety of advanced applications that are starting to enter the workplace. 

Many utilities are striving to establish a digital twin strategy for their organizations. Intelligent design solutions address a critical element of digital twin strategy by authoring the digital twin during the normal business workflow at the inception of the design process. Once the digital twin is created, it persists throughout the construction process, gets modified during as-built verification, and then supports downstream applications that rely on detailed, accurate asset models. 

The example below shows a visualization of the construction process by viewing the 3D model in conjunction with Primavera project management software. The visualization is being hosted by Autodesk Navisworks. 

The digital twin models created during design can also be extended to view the status of the extensive amount of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors that are now populating the electrical smart grid. The example below is a prototype developed by SBS with a leading U.S. utility to create a way of easily visualizing asset performance. This was accomplished by synthesizing the tremendous amount of substation sensor data that is created every day into an actionable user interface. The 3D, intelligent design model can be readily imported into web-based visualization platforms—in this case, Autodesk Forge. 

Summary

This article highlights some of the benefits that can be used to justify an intelligent design initiative. The business returns are very significant, but a couple of additional areas are worthy of mention: safety and IT costs. First, the most overriding concern of any utility is to operate and manage their assets in a safe manner. All of the benefit areas mentioned above enable improved safety. Better quality designs power better, safer construction and asset operations. A second area of critical importance is the ability to reduce IT costs. Intelligent design solutions, when properly implemented, provide a modular and configurable installation, eliminating the need for custom programming, which has historically led to costly upgrades that also prevent utilities from adopting current technologies.   

As always, we welcome your feedback and comments. Please take a look at Part 3 of this series “How to Get Started with Your Intelligent Design Project” when it becomes available. 

Meet with other energy professionals to experience new technologies available in the industry. Visit the exhibit floor to check out our newest product Substation Design Suite™ – Physical for AutoCAD®.  SBS will be hosting Booth #8550. Register today to receive an early bird discount. 

Immerse yourself in the conference by attending workshops, super sessions, panel discussions, tours, and exhibits to learn how to power the energy demands of the future. We hope to see you there! 

Title: IEEE PES T&D Conference & Exposition 

Date: April 25 – 28, 2022  

Location: Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, New Orleans, Louisiana 

Details:  

• Register here. Early bird discount deadline is March 27, 2022. 
• Learn more about the conference here. 
• Visit us at Booth #8550. 

REGISTER HERE. 

Monday, April 25 – Thursday, April 28, 2022