PRISM™ for Electric Utilities

PRISM is a right-of-way management system that allows utilities to develop and maintain an accurate, centralized record of their property rights and holdings, and provides rapid retrieval and dissemination of associated permit and deed documents. With PRISM, a field request is answered with a document image in less than twenty seconds.

PRISM helps track and manage property in the following categories:

• Distribution Line Permits
• Transmission Line Permits
• Fee Land Deeds
• Options/Leases
• Sale Deeds
• Encroachments
• Releases/Confinements
• Easements
• Railroad Licenses
• Permits
• Timber Harvest Contracts
• Shoreline Permits

PRISM provides an extensive database of information related to individual property parcels that helps utilities track and understand where they have rights, what those rights include, what facilities have been built over those rights, and which parties are involved.

Information managed by PRISM 

• Location: Address, state, city/county, lot, block, subdivision, plat book, plat page, addition, sector, township/section/range/Qtr-Qtr, district, land lot, latitude, longitude 
• Parties: Grantee, grantor, signers, lessee, lessor, mortgagee, mortgagor
• Recordation: Courthouse, deed book/page, recordation date, recording fees
• Attributes: Crossings, transformer number, legal description, associated work orders, engineering sketches, acquisition project information, Tax Identification Number, date signed, stations, compensation, drafts, timber info, highest and best use, crop loss, land patents
• Images: Scanned images of the actual deeds, permits and work sketches
• Master/Supplemental Agreements
• Disclaimers
• Quit Claim Documents
• Tenant-at-Will Documents
• Release/Confinement Documents
• Deed/Easement of Correction Documents

PRISM Functionality

PRISM functionality is divided into attribute data entry and information retrieval. Attribute data entry is the process of scanning copies of associated documents and entering property information from that document. A scanner captures an image of each document and stores it on the server. For each document, there are over thirty-five associated data fields that are entered that describe the attributes of that particular document. The system uses these attributes to help users easily locate the document in a subsequent search. The system also includes optical character recognition (OCR) technology to actually “read” information from the document image and translate it for the computer. This technology improves the speed of data entry. The system requires the entry of document attribute data before the user is allowed to store a property record.

The information retrieval function is where PRISM provides the greatest value. PRISM contains a high performance query engine that allows users to quickly search the entire property database using terms they can easily understand. In addition to the ad hoc query engine, there are a number of predefined queries that are built into the system such as:

• Grantee/Grantor search
• Parcel Number search
• Work Order/Project search
• Location search (County/Township/Range/Section/Qtr Qtr)
• Recordation search (Courthouse/Book-record/Page)
• Transformer search
• County/City/Subdivision/Block/Lot search

PRISM was designed with utilities in mind and was built using CTS rigorous software engineering process. PRISM was constructed in a way that allows for easy integration with popular Geographic Information System (GIS) software packages and other document management systems.