Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County Runs Smart Mini City with ArcGIS

Solid Waste Authority (SWA) of Palm Beach County, Florida, serves as a leader in solid waste management. Within its integrated solid waste management system, staff are responsible for maintaining thousands of utility and facility assets that annually process over 1.75 million tons of solid waste. SWA oversees the unincorporated areas of the county and is responsible for the management of solid waste and the permittance of solid waste disposal throughout the county.

Within the main campus, hundreds of people and simultaneous activities converge to reduce, recycle, and dispose of the waste as well as to create renewable energy from it. SWA does this work while keeping the local community safe, maintaining regulatory compliance, and being fiscally sound and environmentally responsible.

What once was a daily operation that lacked real-time situational awareness and had disparate systems of records is now built on a geographic information system (GIS) that is based on software as a service (SaaS) and supports an enterprise-wide modernization.

“The GIS team at SWA consists of two people. Josephine Rudd, GIS manager, and Susan Fox, GIS specialist, are solely responsible for working with all departments at SWA to see how GIS can support their respective workflows. ArcGIS Online is their SaaS-based GIS and is a crucial component for the team’s effort to expand GIS across the authority. Having over 160 end users, the team needed a real-time solution to create a collaborative work environment with a more efficient system of record.

“We started with a one-stop shop and have been trying to expand to more of an authority-wide solution with the resources that we have,” said Rudd.

The goal for the team is to expand GIS throughout the whole enterprise, with each department managing its own data and updating it to create a smart mini city within the authority. 

As part of its integrated solid waste management system, the landfill is required to be swept every quarter for any methane emissions that exceed state and national standards. Previously, the sweeps were completed using a GPS unit—staff would manually write down the location coordinates for exceedances and then map the coordinates on paper. The paper map was the only means for field staff to use and identify potentially hazardous zones, and the process lacked real-time updates for management and overall data accuracy.

The GIS team believed that there had to be a way to simplify this process, so Rudd and Fox set up and implemented a real-time data collection workflow. In ArcGIS Online, precise locations were mapped so that staff in the field would know exactly where to record each reading. Field crews now utilize ArcGIS Field Maps, an all-in-one app that uses data-driven maps and mobile forms to help workers record emission levels.

Once the reading is recorded, a value is returned immediately, color-coded to convey the level of urgency to management, who monitor the data in real time using ArcGIS Dashboards. The impact this workflow modernization has had on operations is significant. What used to take 10 days is now completed on a single day. Each time a workflow is integrated with ArcGIS Dashboards, SWA staff create a layer for the data collection effort, which serves as a far better system of record than the pen and paper method handwritten notes.
 

Streamlining the cumbersome task of tracking methane level history created more efficiencies for the authority. The use of real-time GIS also succeeded for SWA; because of the size of the landfill project, field staff did not know where each point was, nor did managers know what work was still needed. A readily accessible map creates a cohesive work environment and eliminates any delays between upper management and the individuals doing the work in the field, resulting in significant savings.

The first step in launching the plan to expand GIS throughout the authority started with a needs assessment. GIS staff met with every single department to identify and address its needs, and it became very apparent to the team that a work order and asset management system would be extremely beneficial. Some departments had their work showcased in stacks of paper that were two to three feet high. When staff used the paper in the field, they had no way of communicating updates with each other.

Using GIS as a digital system of record was the way to go for the authority because all its assets have a location. The authority chose Cityworks as its work order and asset management system. Since staff had already been converting their computer-aided drafting (CAD) data into GIS data, they had all their aboveground assets in the system ready to go, which shortened the implementation schedule.
 

Utilities staff now use the Cityworks mobile app on a tablet to visualize where all the preventative maintenance tasks are while in the field. Instead of constantly moving from one side of the property to the other, visualizing clusters of preventative maintenance tasks on the map allows workers to do their tasks in one area before moving to the next, increasing efficiency.

The authority is also using GIS for facility management. It realized the benefit of making digital facility asset information available to staff, such as the location, number, and status of elevators, garage doors, and HVAC units, as well as providing a way for employees to report structural issues such as problems with lights, carpets, and asset integrity.

Having all these assets available in the map apps and ArcGIS Dashboards shows the staff everything that is going on within the facilities—who has done what and when, and what repairs and inspections still need to be done. Warranty information is also included in the system, allowing managers to monitor preventative maintenance tasks’ status, and when assets are due for replacement.

This modernization of the legacy workflows, powered by ArcGIS, has aided in the authority’s overarching goal to eliminate data silos and collaborate in real time on work orders and asset and facility management, creating an integrated team across the authority. Anyone can view the system status in real time on any device.

The consistent methodology behind the use of ArcGIS technologies allowed the GIS team to successfully roll out powerful geospatial tools for each department, leading to coordinated strategic decision-making in real time while also delivering operational efficiencies. The result of the team’s work is the evolution of SWA’s integrated solid waste management system into a smart mini city.