Water and Wastewater

The changing expectations of customers and regulators drive a need for smarter data

You are under pressure to deliver efficiency gains, a better customer experience and stronger network resilience, all whilst protecting the natural environment.  Balancing these goals means making smart decisions based on complete information from across your operational region. Robust data on your clients and your network assets is critical.  Is your data fit for purpose?

The data quality challenges are well known; the solutions are here now

Today’s water industry is the outcome of decades of development, privatisation, regulation and merger. For much of that time record keeping was not a priority and geospatial technology was immature.  Only now is the value of operational data being fully recognised and leveraged.

As a result of this chequered past many water and wastewater companies now have a fragmented IT estate.  Spatial data is often distributed across multiple systems and in different standards and formats.  Difficulties arise when businesses try to bring together spatial data or integrate it with other data from across the organisation.  Gaps and errors are widespread.  The data decline spiral – where poor quality reduces usage, causing quality to fall further – is a constant risk.

Companies typically tackle these challenges with manual labour, which is costly and error-prone.  When the data maintenance team becomes overloaded by the volume of change, the business is forced to operate on information that is months or even years out of date.  Costs can be saved by outsourcing data management, but often quality is poor and monitoring or validation is complex.  New capture technologies make huge volumes of survey data available, but too often this GPS-correct new data is not aligned with your operational data.

Now there is a solution. Knowledge-based automation from 1Spatial enables both data cleansing and enduring data management, with minimal manual intervention.  Standardised rules for water network records management and automated procedures customised for your situation deliver a more accurate, complete and up-to-date database.