50 Digitized Processes. Real-Time GIS Visibility. Improved Utility Operations.

Norwich Public Utilities provides electric, water, wastewater, and natural gas services throughout Connecticut.

NPU's four service lines — water, wastewater, electric, and natural gas — ran on paper. Work orders, inspections, and safety documentation all depended on crews filling out forms in the field and someone re-keying them into NPU's systems later, which meant supervisors were often making decisions on paperwork that was already a day or more out of date. Nothing caught an error until it had already been re-entered — and for a utility juggling safety and compliance recordkeeping across four different service lines, that lag was a real operational risk, not just an inconvenience.

NPU worked with Field2Base to convert 50 field reporting processes into a single mobile app, with validation rules and required fields that catch incomplete or inaccurate data before it's ever submitted — not after it lands on someone's desk. The biggest shift was in exposed-pipe reporting: field technicians now capture GPS location and pipe condition directly on a tablet, and Field2Base's Data Integration Module pushes that data straight into NPU's Esri ArcGIS system the moment it's received. What used to be a manual mapping update is now automatic.

NPU’s GIS records now reflect what’s actually happening in the field, not what happened a few days ago. Supervisors get real-time visibility across all four utility lines instead of waiting on paperwork, and because every submission is validated before it’s sent, the re-entry errors that used to slip through simply don’t happen anymore. As GIS Manager David Poore put it, digitizing these forms “effectively changed our field operation procedures” — turning a slow, error-prone paper chain into a live feed of field data.