Privately-owned Park Water Co., serving customers in three separate regions in California and Montana, faced challenges in establishing a geographic information system (GIS).
The scheme had to meet the needs of the company as a whole while accommodating the specific requirements of each of three semi-autonomous regional firms. Engineers and upper management at headquarters needed easy access to details of company assets.
Meanwhile, the regional firms, which had been established before they became part of Park Water, had unique asset numbering systems, jurisdictional arrangements, and database schemes. Complicating matters further, GIS initiatives in the three regions were at different stages of development.
Park Water was able to pull it all together by using standard software, with relatively little customization in each office. The solution also accounts for the strengths and peculiarities of each office, since each one came up with its own scheme for use of existing mapping, local resources, and asset-numbering conventions.
Getting started
Park Water Co., the parent organization based in Downey, Calif., serves 27,500 accounts in Los Angeles County, and is the biggest of the three utilities. Apple Valley Ranchos Water Co. serves 17,000 accounts in San Bernardino County, Calif., and Mountain Water Co. serves 19,300 accounts in Missoula and Superior counties in Montana. Total annual water production is 20.8 billion gallons.
At Park Water, the majority of mapping was still on paper, and the staff needed to decide how to convert to elec-tronic format. At Apple Valley Ranchos, most maps had been converted to electronic, but geolocation was limited, and GIS had not been considered. Mountain Water had all relevant mapping converted to AutoCAD drawings with layering and attribution schemes in place for easy conversion to a GIS.
Aaron Gutierrez, GIS coordinator for all of Park Water, arrived at the company 1 1/2 years ago and concentrates on the California holdings. He started by preparing a project overview detailing the need for a GIS, the challenges faced, and the necessary steps for implementation. “We definitely found that there was a lot of misinformation about location of assets,” says Gutierrez.
Other challenges included meter locations known only to long-time meter readers, vital data stored in five formats (including a database that was the personal project of an engineering technician and turned out to be highly useful) and serious issues with accessibility, usability, and maintainability of data.
After identifying needs and priorities, Gutierrez used the report to prepare bid documents. He then engaged the successful bidder, Nobel Systems, based in San Bernardino, to convert paper maps as needed, and to use GPS to locate assets, including all hydrants and gate valves.
“We gave them the data conversion plan that I created,” says Gutierrez, “and they got started converting our source documents into a geometric network in AutoCAD. They used the coordinates they collected to align the source documents.”
A handle on assets
Park Water Co. uses ESRI software for its GIS in all offices. “We considered AutoCAD Map,” says Gutierrez, “because of the tight link to our drawings, but we found it a little convoluted for our purposes.” However, the layering and attribute scheme adopted for AutoCAD drawings did transfer easily to the ESRI GIS. Some useful information was obtained from the Central Basin Municipal Water District, the water wholesaler in the area.
“Since the conversion, we’ve been able to improve the alignment of data with the land base,” Gutierrez says. “The look and feel of our paper mapping is better, and we finally have a good inventory of our assets.” In addition, office staff members have more information at their fingertips, and can easily locate specific elements of the system.
One big success is the increased automation of underground service alerts. “Our field crews are using tablet PCs,” Gutierrez says. “All of our service alerts come to us by e-mail, and the e-mails are parsed and administered to provide staff with the location and type of assets that might be affected by a dig. Crews can also call up as-built drawings.”
The service alert system is based on Field Mapplet, a customizable application developed by Spatial Wave Software. “It has worked out very well, and we’ll eventually use it for service orders as well, and extend it to the Apple Valley and Montana offices,” Gutierrez says.
In addition to more tablet PCs, Park Water Co. will acquire a Trimble GeoXT handheld GPS unit for in-house locating and expects to provide wireless GIS access to field crews.
In Apple Valley, Gutierrez converted existing AutoCAD drawings in-house and again used ESRI applications, mainly ArcReader, to publish the resulting geodatabase. He exchanged information with the Mojave Water Agency, which sets water policy for the region. “We were able to provide information like the locations of wells and other assets, and they provided us with jurisdictional boundaries and such,” he says.
Gutierrez has arranged to send a few staff members to the Redmond ESRI office for training, and he has conducted in-house training. “We also ask contractors and providers, like Spatial Wave and Nobel, to provide training — we made it part of the contract,” he says.
Farther along in Montana
At Mountain Water Co., GIS Specialist and cartographer Jennifer Wicks has been with the firm for nine years. When she arrived, one of her first tasks was to convert existing paper maps to AutoCAD drawings. Instead of scanning, she recreated the source documents for greater precision.
Although she had no clear mandate to implement a GIS, Wicks thought ahead when doing the CAD work. “I thought about what would be needed for a GIS, and I knew that having separate layers for everything would make things a whole lot easier,” Wicks says. She was also systematic when setting up a consistent scheme for attaching attributes to blocks.
To geolocate assets in-house, Mountain Water uses a pair of GeoXT units to attach coordinates to new and existing assets as needed. “When new water mains are installed, we have people who do walkthrough inspections and photograph and GPS the various features,” Wicks says. About a dozen employees use the units regularly.
Wicks considered AutoCAD Map for GIS purposes, but says, “Not everyone uses AutoCAD. To allow other people to access the data, to query it and actually use it, ArcGIS is a lot better. Of course, for editing and precise drawing, AutoCAD is better. They both stand out in their specialties.”
Valuable tool
In setting up the GIS later, her careful work in AutoCAD payed off as she converted the drawings into an ESRI database. The attribute data came over easily, and the blocks used for features also imported well.
“I used an ESRI water geodatabase as a template, and modified it quite a bit to fit our specific needs,” she says, “for example, the types of valves they had listed were different from ours. I added custom fields for our asset numbering system, site plan numbers and so forth, and I incorporated our pressure zones.”
In Montana, basic base maps — sections, parcels, roads, rivers and other major features — are provided free by the state. The City of Missoula provided aerial mapping. Missoula also manages the sewer systems and provided that information to Mountain Water, which in turn provided water information to the city, and hydrant locations to the fire department.
Paper mapping remains a challenge. “Once a year, I still publish our entire system in updated maps,” Wicks says. “We cover 46 sections, so that’s about a 50-sheet atlas, with one section per 24- by 32-inch page. I’d love to get away from that, and I encourage laptop use, but a lot of people still like paper. Some may never embrace the technology.”
Nevertheless, several employees use the GIS weekly, and Wicks expects that number to rise. “ESRI has made it easy to publish web servers, and I think that there will be more users when a browser becomes the interface,” she says.
The GIS has already proven invaluable. “Just getting the water mains located and entered into our fixed asset system, and tracking asset numbers, was important, and now we finally have all that information in one electronic system,” Wicks says.
“And when we print map books, each page is a section of the public land survey system. Each section is an AutoCAD drawing file. Consequently, we have 50 separate drawing files for the entire system. Invariably, critical information falls on the section lines, requiring a person to cross-reference drawings together. In ArcGIS, the entire system is stored in one geodatabase, so a person can look at the entire system at once.”
Seeking consistency
Park Water Co. is definitely interested in consistency across the system. “Integration among the three companies is important so that engineers and upper management have access to systemwide data,” Gutierrez says. “We’ll be using ArcGIS server to make connections between all three, so that people here at headquarters have better access to all regions.”
One goal of the GIS initiative is to facilitate more efficient use of engineering and management talent and resources companywide. This is helped by the consistent choices of AutoCAD-based engineering and drafting software, and ESRI-based GIS software with relatively little customization.
At the same time, the team accounted for differences between the three regions and followed a nuanced approach to GIS creation, rather than a rigid set of common standards. Each region followed unique policies for mapping conversion, and each used existing asset numbering systems and other data. And each was able to incorporate free, useful data from local jurisdictions, and to share data in a way that made sense.
With a consistent GIS platform in place, Park Water Co. can project more advanced uses of geodatabases. “Wireless is exciting because it will save us trips back to the office, and by using ArcGIS server technology, we’ll eventually be able to automate dispatching for service calls, web mapping, and more,” Gutierrez says.
Gutierrez and Wicks also look forward to reducing paper mapping as more field crew members adopt wireless tablet PCs. By combining consistent software choices with flexible implementation that respects local idiosyncrasies, Park Water Co. efficiently implemented a GIS that is the right size for local offices, and still facilitates an efficient approach companywide.
