The following two-part blog was contributed by Tom Vick, Director of Engineering at Pioneer Communications. Pioneer Communications has been a Mapcom Systems customer for four years. In part two of this series, Tom discusses the company’s transition to Mapcom Systems’ M4 Solutions.
In 2012, Pioneer Communications moved to the Mapcom Suite of Products, mainly due to Mapcom’s experience integrating with other OSS/CMS software, including our billing software provider. At the time of our mapping conversion (prior to Mapcom), and our initial training in M4 Solutions, during the summer of 2013, we saw some potential regarding the strong possibility of eventually being able to tabulate all units in M4.
We continued to tabulate the RUS-type units in a separate database (Access), from 1997 until April, 2016. In the summer of 2015, we met with Mapcom Systems in Richmond, and laid out our thoughts as to a possible revision in some tables, some added tables, and a new process that would allow us to tabulate everything (all RUS-type units) in M4. We discussed several options, and Mapcom did show us how some of their other clients were doing this as early as 2013. None of the solutions we saw seemed to be easy or elegant, so we started thinking outside the box, and asked that Mapcom start thinking outside the box as well.
We saw that we could add Fields, to existing Tables, such as UnitDesignation1 and UnitQuantity1, through UnitDesignation10 and UnitQuantity10, etc., and would be able to tabulate up to 10 (or more) miscellaneous Units in this manner. It would work, but it wasn’t pretty. What if I only needed 2 Units/Quantities on one backspan (or pedestal), and 12 Units/Quantities on the next backspan (or pedestal)? And the LENGTH of any Dropdown (listing of all possible Units, for limited validation purposes) would be huge (possibly up to 1700 or more). Not very pretty.
Why couldn’t we implement one or more MiscUnits-type Tables, and apply UnitDesignations and UnitQuantities in these new tables? Maybe auto-populate things like the WO Number, Route/Facility ID, Tax District, etc., from the main Unit (Units associated with Graphical Elements) to the MiscUnits table(s)? Could we modify many of the existing element/database tables, such that by filling in a Unit Type (i.e., BD, BFC, BFO, etc.), Size (i.e., 25, 50, etc.), Gauge (i.e., 24, 22, etc.) and Suffix (i.e., I, E, D, etc.,), such that we could auto-populate a field named UnitDesignation (i.e., BFC25-24E)?
In February, 2016, Mapcom Systems, specifically Jackie Plain, jumped into this project with both feet, and helped us design an easy and elegant solution. Mapcom and Jackie did the heavy lifting, building all the needed tables, and adding update and auto-populate triggers in the SQL tables. Working with Mapcom Systems, we were able to design and customize the tables, and our processes, to the point where we are now able to tabulate everything in M4 Solutions. Today, we are able to tabulate all RUS-type Units, by Work Order, and Report (the out-of-the-box reporting for Work Orders in M4 does not provide for an RUS-type Listing and/or Summary of Units) from As Staked to As Built Listings, Check Listing and numerous Summaries. We are able to do this in one place (M4 Solutions), and we can do it faster, more efficiently and more accurately than our previous processes. Yes, this is a new process, and it takes some getting used to. And, we are finding that this new process is working extremely well for our engineering, OSP and Accounting needs.