Case Study for a Public Utility

Installing and maintaining natural gas lines is a never-ending task. Clearly, safety is the No. 1 concern; providing construction crews with accurate and timely information needed to locate lines and possibly prevent accidents is crucial to the business.

In 1999 Virginia Natural Gas (VNG) contacted DataVault, Inc. with a challenge. “How can we have immediate availability to our 400,000 service cards, from the field?” A service card has two sides; one shows where the gas lines are located at a specific site, and the other side contains information about the address.

DataVault performed a needs assessment to identify the present workflow and design a solution. Instead of a third-party calling into VNG for a copy of the service card, VNG manually searching for the card, faxing it to the main office, and having the driver return to the office to pick it up, why not digitally scan each card, store it on the web, and allow secured access from anywhere in the world? That is exactly what they did.

DataVault began scanning service cards in 1999 and presently hosts almost a million cards on their secure web-server. Anytime, from anywhere, VNG has full access to this critical information with immediate availability. This has saved thousands of dollars, thousands of hours researching and making copies, and who knows how many accidents and how much third-party property damage has been prevented. As a side benefit, VNG has realized an increase in customer satisfaction through a reduction in the time it takes to gather information and ultimately start the project.


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