About Us

We work at the intersection of utility networks and geographic information systems. Our focus is to provide customers with a solid foundation for supporting utility GIS applications. Elements of this foundation include a data model designed to meet your business needs and processes to load and maintain the Geodatabase that is built for you based on that model.

BSL experience in utility GIS data modeling, migration and maintenance can help ensure the success of your GIS implementation project.

Data, it’s always the data!

In his classic book “Building Your ArcFM” this is how Jeff Meyers paraphrased the late Vince Lombardi’s lament, “The knee, its always the knee,” about setbacks. Of course Lombardi was talking about football injuries and Meyers about GIS implementation project issues. Both can be costly. And there’s no surefire way to prevent either, but at least for GIS projects bringing experience, knowledge and dedication to bear on data-related tasks can move your project forward.

Experience

Blair Services was founded in 2012 by Ed Blair after spending 22+ years with Miner and Miner (M&M) , Telvent and Schneider Electric (we’ll just use M&M for simplicity.)  For the majority of his time with M&M Blair was the head of delivery services with overall responsibility for project teams implementing ArcGIS and ArcFM Solution components for many, many utility companies, large and small.  During much of his tenure with M&M Blair took on direct project roles for tasks requiring electronic data migration from some source mapping formation into ArcFM data structures.   In the process BSL has gained direct familiarity with over 100 electric, gas, water and wastewater geographic databases and built first-hand understanding of the challenges and opportunities surrounding electronic migration of GIS data.

What We Believe

We believe in providing our customers services they value highly at a very fair price.  We want to build strong, long-lasting relationships with our customers and our partners.  We believe the best companies are those that do a significant percentage of  their work with repeat customers, based on an established relationship of trust.  And while data migration services aren’t typically needed on a regular basis, we’ll strive to build relationships where customers can trust in our services when the need arises.

Delivery and maintenance of a GIS for a utility company is not simple.  The software is sophisticated and  the implementation process includes many options and decisions to help ensure a best fit for each particular company.  Over the years we’ve seen some companies completely capable of all aspects of the implementation and they do it themselves and others who hand over the full responsibility to a turnkey vendor.  However, most take on tasks for which they feel confident and look to experienced partners for tasks that are somewhat specialized and for which there might not be an on-going need once the implementation is complete.  In these cases it’s Blair Services goal to bring knowledge, skill and experience to an implementation project to help ensure its success.

In our spare time

Eddy the Electron