Florida County Projects to Save $2 Million per Year with Digital Map Editing

Miami-Dade County Water and Sewer Department provides clean drinking water and wastewater disposal services to more than 2.6 million residents, businesses, and visitors. It manages thousands of miles of water and wastewater pipes, distributing and collecting hundreds of millions of gallons of water and wastewater each day. In the past, the utility depended on customized editing extensions to incorporate data from new developments throughout the county. But recently, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-mandated consent decree required more timely incorporation of as-built information into Miami-Dade’s geographic information system (GIS). So staff—who previously could spend up to three-quarters of their time performing time-consuming manual data editing, resulting in an information backlog that, by federal mandate, needed to be incorporated into the GIS—chose to redesign their schemas. MiamiDade needed to update its editing process to ensure that staff could meet their consent decree mandates. 

The Miami-Dade County Water and Sewer Department drastically improved its editing processes. First, staff eliminated many of the custom-built editing tools used to incorporate new as-built data into the GIS, including data-driven pages that streamlined the atlas plotting workflow. The department leveraged dynamic field maps, built into ArcGIS Online and WebApp Builder for ArcGIS. In addition, by changing the look of their atlas sheets and changing from one square-mile to quarter-square-mile maps, the team was able to eliminate the use of representations and feature-linked annotations. With these improvements, the department has seen a 60 percent increase in editor productivity. The boost in productivity has freed up tens of thousands of hours in staff time, resulting in $2 million in estimated savings. The changes have also put Miami-Dade County on track to meet its consent decree mandates for as-builts. 

“By leveraging off-the-shelf, configurable solutions, we were able to increase productivity by 60 percent, allowing us to meet our consent decree mandates related to as-built incorporation and avoid penalties.” - Jose Lopez Computer Services Manager Miami-Dade County

If your organization uses custom workflows to collect, edit, and update data, consider moving to a COTS solution for tasks such as digital data integration. Editing directly on multiple devices that “talk” to each other ensures greater accuracy and reduces labor costs. The ArcGIS platform offers out-of-the-box solutions for data editing along with the proven GIS solution ArcGIS for Water Utilities. With this COTS approach to data integration, Miami-Dade dramatically improved its in-office production editing workflow.