Best use of new technology for maps

Icon Water operates assets worth over $2.2 billion covering the territory’s network of dams, water treatment plants, sewage treatment plants, reservoirs, water and sewage pumping stations, mains, customer connections, and other related infrastructure. Managing all this infrastructure is a complex business.

ESRI Enterprise ArcGIS has been implemented through ArcGIS for Water Standard Utility Model. This GIS system has been successfully upgraded into a privately managed cloud environment hosted in Amazon Web Services that addresses previous system limitations associated with adaptability and agile change.

ArcGIS Enterprise provides contextual tools for mapping and spatial reasoning so you can explore data and share location-based insights. The combination of these technologies delivers a sustainable, long-term solution for Icon Water – key to providing the central system for Asset Management, Customer Engagement and Financial technologies and strategies. As a result, full connectivity has been established across the entirety of networks, including flow direction across the sewer network.

The portal for ArcGIS has been developed to publish web-based maps, improving customer experience, productivity and making life easier for both field and office staff. This particular interface is an industry first, integrating ArcGIS software into a water utility model. It is intuitive and enables the building of innovative solutions tailored to an individual’s needs, including:

Real-time redline markups

• an organisation-wide inclusive solution where employees can capture and display network errors in real-time. This provides a traffic light triage as these errors are processed
• avoids reporting and capturing the same network errors

Outage Management – Network Trace Capability

• enhanced field operations through real-time network outage management tools leading to improved customer service and reliability
• ability to identify critical customers that will be affected such as schools, hospitals and dialysis customers

Drone to Map

• the ability to process and publish drone survey footage, providing spatially located high-resolution imagery through web-maps, assisting in business and environmental assessments

Integration with other asset management systems

• provides capability for a real-time spatial view of our network status from the network control system (SCADA)
• provides a modern and easy search functionality to identify and locate infrastructure

Valve Status display

• visually captures valve status by operators, providing instant communication of valve state to improve network reliability, outage planning and avoid possible cross-contamination

External Information

• provides modern information-rich map views to overlay over the network through a simple import functionality of publicly available maps, for example contaminated site information, improving safety for field maintenance activities

Water Meters

• easier identification of meters providing sub-meter accuracy through GPS technology which can be uploaded into the GIS framework

Customer View Portal

• the capability to improve customer experience by easily making maps of Icon Water assets available to developers and builders

The benefits of these applications have replaced inefficient multiple paper-based processes with automated systems. Digital data collection via web maps, “collector” and “Survey 123” for ArcGIS are now available to internal and external stakeholders with information captured directly into corporate systems.

This new configuration provides many benefits over the traditional on-premise deployments including:

• rapid deployment of applications
• flexible configurations of infrastructure and services
• cost-effective: no upfront or long term IT commitments, only pay for what you use
• scalable IT infrastructure to meet peak demand
• secure end-to-end environment.

Icon Water’s AWS deployment leveraged these benefits to deliver a cloud-based ArcGIS solution, which enables the business to more effectively manage its assets. The Portal for ArcGIS web apps and services provide a rich, intuitive mapping solution, which has increased business productivity and decision-making. Similarly, this has improved the company’s ability to handle Big Data, scaling across multiple levels of volume, variety and veracity. The AWS will continue to provide the scalability needed to expand across the business as more, systems are integrated with the GIS to deliver Icon Water’s transformation program.