user story
The Public Works Department at the City of Provo is responsible for delivering safe and reliable water, wastewater, and stormwater services to its more than 18,000 customers. Already utilizing Esri's ArcGIS Enterprise on the geometric network, Provo saw how upgrading to Esri's new ArcGIS Utility Network could greatly benefit the organization.
With a goal for its staff to perform most of the work to upgrade to the ArcGIS Utility Network, the City of Provo, Utah, selected POWER Engineers, Inc., to instruct city staff on how to perform the ArcGIS Utility Network implementation. Staff learned how to leverage tools and processes developed by both POWER and Esri: ArcGIS Data Interoperability, ArcGIS Data Reviewer, ArcGIS Pro, and the POWER Readiness Assessment.
Customer – City of Provo, Public Works Department
Partner – POWER Engineers: A full-service global consulting and engineering firm specializing in integration and progressive solutions.
Challenge - Replace manual, time-consuming processes.
Solution - Implementation of the Utility Network for water, wastewater, and stormwater.
Result – More accurate modeling and automation of processes.
With the requirement to update their comprehensive plan, Provo staff had to manually identify all the pressure zones, watershed areas, and sewer management areas. This process was tedious and time-consuming for the team, as mappers would spend hours manually tracing out the extents of each zone and populating attributes on the corresponding features. Researching issues was labor-intensive and would frequently necessitate the use of external support. Manual processes also increased the likelihood of data errors. The most common errors were features either not getting assigned to a zone or being assigned to the wrong zone. Because many of these processes are also tied to permitting or regulatory processes, it is especially important that the data is accurate, otherwise it can lead to slow and costly audits.
POWER is a full-service global consulting and engineering firm specializing in integration and progressive solutions for utilities, energy, facilities, communications, environmental, food and beverage and Federal markets. Services include strategic consulting, workflows and requirements, gap analysis, data migration/conversion, geodatabase maintenance, application development and integration/implementation with access to Institute of Asset Management (IAM) certified consultants.
Project Team:
Provo successfully implemented a full conversion and implementation of the core ArcGIS Utility Network model for water, wastewater and stormwater. Automated data cleanup fixes were applied to resolve the configuration and data enrichment issues that were encountered during the network build and subnetwork tracing processes. These automated fixes included implementing an additional set of rules that allowed the core asset package to reflect the current data model and business practices. These additional rules not only helped improve data quality of the geographic information system (GIS) but also gave Provo confidence that its GIS model for all assets is accurately modeling the real-world features within its systems.
Water system shown in the Utility Network.
All of Provo's data is now accurately modeled within the Utility Network, and all networks and tracing functionality are 100 percent operational. Even though Provo had good data quality in the geometric network, hidden gaps and inaccuracies were revealed during the pilot phase of the project. The move to the Utility Network is allowing Provo to achieve more accurate modeling and automated data validation. This led to Provo's data quality issues being automatically identified, and most have been corrected. Provo is now benefiting from the automated data validation process and the increased access to accurate network information at every level of the organization. By using the foundational tools provided by Esri, this base template lays the foundation for enhanced functionality to accommodate Provo's future growth. Provo has plans to automate the validation of dirty areas from a mobile platform and is in the process of moving its water model from a node-to-link model to an all pipes model.
With ArcGIS Utility Network providing service-level access, we have put accurate data into the hands of more users at all levels within the organization to increase vested interest in the data as well as the value from the data. This helps us tremendously as a data-driven organization.
