Know where you are with water management

Location intelligence brings benefits to SA Water

SA Water is a government-owned corporation that provides water and wastewater services to over 1.5 million customers throughout South Australia. The company has the task of managing more than $8 billion in assets, composed of more than 33,000 kilometres of water and wastewater mains, associated treatment plants, laboratories and fabrication workshops.

To ensure the effective management of its vast network of assets, SA Water uses a geographic information system (GIS). With a GIS, users can link information attributes to location data, such as people to addresses, buildings to parcels, or streets within a network.

The GIS collates data on a broad range of assets in SA Water’s business including reticulation networks and treatment plants, reservoirs, tanks, valves, manholes and drains. This information is used to manage the water capture, flow and usage across the network. For example, SA Water can visually model how factors such as reservoir capacity and burst pipes impact individual customers.

Recently, there was an increasing demand on SA Water to share location-related services beyond the GIS department. To meet its growing needs, SA Water worked with ESRI Australia to upgrade its GIS solution.

While the GIS was used extensively by SA Water for collating location-related information, it was not integrated with other corporate systems. The upgrade enabled this integration with systems such as: the water quality system, which gives results of laboratory tests; the call centre, combining the incident and caller’s location to enable operators to see if subsequent calls are from the same area and potentially related to the same cause; and census data is also integrated to enable system planners to use AquaMap in their expansion plans. With a variety of information sources feeding into a single view, the company can better understand its entire network.

Since upgrading its GIS and implementing a location intelligence gateway known as AquaMap internally, more than 1300 staff now use location intelligence to enhance asset management, customer service, operational management, finance and administration, and planning decisions. To date, spatial information has been integrated with records of more than 800,000 parcels of land and over one million digital images of pipe as constructed drawings.

SA Water is now able to effectively assess how its water and wastewater assets are performing. For example, it can pinpoint the exact location of a leak in its network and deploy a field response team to rapidly and accurately manage the incident. From shutting down the problem through to restoring services to all affected customers, the GIS can identify what actions need to be taken and where.

In the long term, AquaMap can also guide decisions such as when to replace a pipe completely. Work orders are detailed in AquaMap to show where clusters of work have been carried out on the same line. This is fed into the annual maintenance program to monitor for ongoing problems and ensure they are addressed before a larger issue occurs.

Managing resources more accurately doesn’t only have a positive impact on the company’s assets but it can also support customer services by enabling staff to answer a range of customer queries with increased efficiency and accuracy.

No longer confined to the company alone, SA Water’s AquaMap is now accessed by a wide range of external stakeholders such as surveyors, land developers and the plumbing industry. By providing direct and secure access to appropriate location information, the many demands on water in a given area can be mapped and modelled.

SA Water is currently working on a range of initiatives to integrate location-based data further with business processes. For example, it is developing a Mobile Field Force solution that will deliver integrated location-based and work management data to tablet PCs fitted to operational vehicles.