Data Integration for TIMP and DIMP Compliance

In providing water, natural gas, and electricity to the public, the Utilities industry is one of the most vital sectors in sustaining human life. In addition to being a major public service provider, private Utilities are businesses with bottom lines. And, let’s face it, for natural gas companies, staying compliant with Transmission Integrity Management and Gas Distribution Integrity Management regulations can affect bottom line…but, not as much as being incompliant does.

Since they were introduced in 2004 and 2010 by the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), the Gas Transmission and Distribution Integrity Management regulations have aimed to keep High Consequence Areas (HCAs) safe from harm caused by old, corroding pipelines and other assets. These regulations require natural gas Utilities to identify, prioritize, assess, evaluate, repair, and validate the integrity of transmission and distribution assets and processes, and report their yearly findings to PHMSA. In addition to compromising safety for the public, failing to comply with these TIMP and DIMP regulations leads to steep fines of up to tens of millions of dollars.

The burning question surrounding Utility organizations has always been how to avoid these fines and keep them from impacting the bottom line. This is where productized data integration comes in. Keeping up with TIMP and DIMP compliance is more than just maintaining the integrity of assets, it also includes meticulous field data collection, inspection, and analysis. By integrating your mobile systems, Geographic Information System (GIS), Customer Information System (CIS), and your organization’s Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system like Maximo or SAP, field compliance activities such as corrosion inspections, station detail analysis, etc. can easily be entered into one system and automatically synchronized with the other systems.

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Consider how your team currently manages the collection and reporting of this integrity management data. How do field teams using mobile apps transmit their information back to the asset management system or the GIS system? And how does the asset eventually get repaired/ replaced and then synchronized to the other systems? Does the process require several team members performing dual entry or several months to complete? Can your organization complete all the evaluation, data collection, maintenance, and reporting before the March 15^th deadline?

With an off-the-shelf data and application integration solution, organizations can simplify and speed up these processes. Look for a solution that natively supports ESRI’s REST API for mobile applications for users in the field. Equally important is a solution that has pre-built business logic connectors to synchronize this data between your EAM, CIS, and GIS systems. Multi-directional communication is key to providing the flexibility your organization needs to achieve its compliance goals (psst…Geonexus can help).

Leveraging a productized solution is more time/effort efficient than the alternative of a custom developed solution or manual process, and will save your organization money in maintenance costs. By enabling your organization to realize the value of your current system’s functionality and speed up transmission and distribution compliance, the Geonexus Integration Platform can help your organization avoid millions in regulatory fines, and improve system health and enterprise data integrity.

For more information on how the Geonexus Integration Platform can save you time and money with a low-code, no-code integration solution and a consistent view of enterprise data start by clicking here.