Kropmann Communications Nigeria’s indigenous ICT Professional services provider has declared its readiness to deliver world class geospatial technology solutions to the Nigerian market specifically with the public utility sector in mind.
Kim Fraser, chief executive officer of the company, made this known in a media interactive session recently in Lagos while answering questions from journalists pertaining to the application of geospatial technology in Nigeria.
Fraser said that Kropmann took a special interest in the geospatial technology arena because they saw lots of benefits of the technology, especially as it relates to the enhancement of the public utilities in Nigeria.
In his clarification, the CEO explained that Kropmann Communications is targeting public utilities (water services, telecommunications, transportation, electricity, etc), with geographic information system (GIS), which is a computer system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of spatial or geographical data.
According to him, “the move became necessary as many of the Nigerian utility sector especially the power, telecom and oil and gas do not have comprehensive infrastructural background information as to how many locations they have, and even when they do have these, they are done on paper and could be an onerous task sorting them periodically especially with regular updating, as this in turn will be hard to manage effectively”.
While inviting public utility providers to visit the company’s stand at the forth-coming Africa Geospatial Forum which comes up between the 9th and 10th of December 2014 at the Eko Hotels and Conventions center, to learn more about the value proposition of Kropmann Communications in this area of technology, Mr Fraser further advocated for the adoption of GIS technology for companies with diverse assets.
Frasier explained that lots of the Nigerian companies with large disperse of infrastructure across various locations cannot tell how many equipment they have.
Saying, “they don’t know where their assets are located, how they are functioning at any time and of course, they incur a lot of cost in the process of trying to do the physical monitoring of these sites, and that’s why Kropmann decided that the GIS solution would be beneficial to these companies to enable them solve some infrastructure management challenges”.
With the GIS solution from Kropmann, utility concerns will be able to map, model, and analyze large quantities of data within a single database according to their location.
The GIS will give them the ability to create readable information in map format and representing the images graphically or pictorially.
Explaining further, the company said that with this tool, the utility companies like the power sector, can capture and create a graphic information or image of these dispersed utilities capturing their location, how many they are at any location and also monitor their functioning capacity.
“With this,” he said, “they are able to see the electrical transmission lines on the map, the location of the sub-stations, the step-up and step-down transformers, the cable line that run into the offices and homes, and this can be done in modules to allow for cluster management of equipment and with monitoring device in place, they see and know the functioning capacity of the equipment”.
The company believes that with the simplicity of the technology with its image representation clearly spelt out and easy to read, the adoption rate will be very fast.
The CEO also explained that for GIS, Kropmann Communications is partnering Real World Systems – a leading manufacturer of world class GIS solutions.
“They are a group of geospatial experts specialised in the various areas of geospatial technology and their work speaks volume and we have learnt from the best as regards the use of GIS to solve monitoring and access issues for utility providers” he concluded.