HIGHLAND >> Since trading in paper maps for digital ones, the East Valley Water District has been able to monitor its infrastructure and customer water use more efficiently.
The Highland-based water district uses Esri’s geographic information systems technology, or GIS, to identify and fix leaks more quickly, track water consumption and conservation, as well as monitor other happenings in the field in real time.
“We’re not making decisions based on emotion or gut feeling. The decisions we make have a foundation behind them — empirical data that justifies the decisions we make,” said Robert Peng, the district’s information technology manager.
The water district uses GIS for asset management, such as maintenance of water mains and infrastructure, and ArcGIS for water usage and various operations dashboards showing field activities.
In 2008, Esri developed a GIS Road Map and pilot project to help the water district implement GIS. The water district entered into a Small Utility Enterprise License Agreement with Esri, giving them unlimited access to ArcGIS software along with assistance from Esri employees, Suzanne Timani, senior account executive with Esri, said.
About 90 percent of water agencies in the state are using Esri’s technology, Timani said.
Esri works with small, medium and large agencies to identify their needs, challenges and how they can “make them more efficient, save them time and money and of course, water,” Timani said. “Especially these days in California with the drought, the Esri location platform is a key solution for that.”
The technology has proved useful since Gov. Jerry Brown’s executive order mandated water agencies across the state cut back on water use. The software allows them to identify their highest water users, who they can then reach out to.
“If we can get to those customers first, we would expedite reaching our conservation goal much faster because we are targeting the most inefficient customers,” Peng said. “It’s really a mutually benefiting relationship. We’re going to help them conserve water and save money on their water bills.”
The technology also helps the district determine infrastructure repairs. They can use the data collected from the field to identify the infrastructure in most need of replacement, which is more cost effective.
“We have miles of mains and if we recognize we’re pouring all these resources into a single main, we can analyze that and say it may be more cost effective for us to do a replacement rather than to continue maintenance on a single asset that continues to fail,” Peng said.
The water district is also using Esri’s technology to identify the age of its nearly 23,000 water meters. The goal is to install advanced meters which would allow the district’s customer service representatives to read meters from the office.
The water district’s partnership with Esri has made them a model for other water agencies looking to integrate GIS technology. In April, representatives from the Dubai Water Authority visited the water district to learn about their use of GIS, such as their programs for landscape analysis, utility billing and quality control measures.
The water district’s work has also been presented to Esri users.
The system did not take long to implement in the district, Peng said.
“These are what we call templates, so Esri does a really good job of building these templates so they’re almost ready to go out of the box,” Peng said. “We just need to tell the dashboard where to grab the data and what data to grab.”
