Water and Wastewater

The changing expectations of customers and regulators drive a need for smarter spatial 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 benefits of accurate, complete, and timely spatial data

• Increase revenues – accurately report the scale of your network to the regulator
• Enhance customer service – provide rapid, complete answers to queries about leaks, water quality or maintenance works
• Lower operating costs – improve street works efficiency and reduce fines
• Reduce risk – avoid asset strikes
• Target investment – focus funds on assets where outcomes can be maximised
• Avoid fines – ensure valid supply point data is submitted to the market.

The geospatial 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 mergers. 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 further data from across the organisation.  Gaps and errors are widespread, exposing the data decline spiral – where poor quality reduces usage, causing quality to decrease further – a constant risk.

Companies typically tackle these challenges with manual labour, which is costly and error prone.  When the geospatial 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overloaded by the volume of change, the business is forced to operate on information that is months or even years out of date.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 substantial volumes of survey data available, but too often this new GPS-correct 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 record management and automated procedures customised for your situation deliver a more accurate, complete and up-to-date database.