Société Wallonne des Eaux

Opportunity

The Walloon Water Company (Société Wallonne des Eaux – SWDE) is a public enterprise whose mission is to produce and distribute drinking water in the Walloon region of Belgium. Its activities cover 208 of the 262 Walloon municipalities. The company serves over 1,000,000 connections and provides drinking water to almost 2.4 million people, which represents 70% of the Walloon population. Improving its knowledge of its assets and infrastructure is a priority issue for SWDE.

Solution

SWDE chose the industry-focused Geographic Information System (GIS) developed by 1Spatial. The key objectives were to have a tool dedicated to the maintenance and update of the network plans stored in a central shared database, and to provide staff with applications specific to water network management (such as leakage detection, zone management, fire hydrant coverage, etc.). Special focus was also given to interfacing with third party products: SAP/R3 to create and follow up work tickets related to all network interventions, and SWDE’s Electronic Document Management system for the storage of installation plans or any documents related to network objects. The goal was lastly to implement a mobile GIS for field workers, and to make geographic information available through an intranet based application for the first time with the potential for a public facing site in the future.

Outcome

As expected, the GIS is now a key and central tool for the knowledge and maintenance of SWDE’s infrastructure. Indeed, SWDE has created a dedicated GIS team to enhance the database and to manage numerous future developments.