Founded in 1911, the Eugene Water & Electric Board (EWEB) is Oregon’s largest customer-owned utility, providing water and electricity to over 86,000 homes, businesses, schools and other customers in Eugene, Oregon. EWEB has a service territory of 235 square miles and employs over 500 people throughout the utility.
Challenge #1:
EWEB had no Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system to track assets, so asset information was stored in siloed and disparate systems maintained by a variety of processes throughout the utility. This management practice led to unreliable and inconsistent data. For many years, EWEB employed Esri ArcGIS to manage their assets, but GIS alone did not meet their needs for recording service history, maintenance costs, current and future needs, and asset tracking. Through trial and tribulation, EWEB knew they needed to establish a more robust enterprise asset architecture to reliably manage assets and improve business processes.
Challenge #2:
EWEB feared that after implementation of an EAM system, there would be a new set of issues to address. First of all, how would roughly 500,000 assets be loaded from their existing ArcGIS geodatabase to a new EAM? Additionally, since GIS was the system of record, they worried about keeping the two disconnected databases updated and synchronized. In order to build a reliable and proven foundation for success, EWEB was intent on implementing a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution to address these challenges.
EWEB selected and implemented Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management (WAM). During the implementation process, EWEB knew they needed to utilize a synchronization tool to solve their data loading and integration concerns. To meet these objectives, EWEB deployed Geonexus’ GeoWorx Sync, a standardized and tested COTS application for data integration. GeoWorx Sync allows data loading and synchronization between Esri’s ArcGIS and EAM systems based on configurable rules and validation without compromising data integrity or schemas.
GUI to configure rules for the GIS to Oracle WAM synchronization in GeoWorx Sync.
Oracle WAM provides management of EWEB’s asset related information across multiple departments throughout the utility including the design, construction, joint use, and commissioning of new assets. Oracle WAM also provides the means for tracking the operation, maintenance, replacement, and decommissioning of existing assets.
With the implementation of GeoWorx Sync, EWEB was able to load roughly 500,000 assets from their established GIS to their new Oracle WAM system. Without GeoWorx Sync, this task would have been incredibly time consuming and costly.
Today, GeoWorx Sync provides nightly bi-directional synchronization so new data, regardless if it was entered from ArcGIS or Oracle WAM, remains current and accurate in both databases. Without Geonexus’ tool, EWEB would have had the daunting, and often expensive, task of creating a customized interface between Esri GIS and Oracle WAM to keep the two systems current.
Interested in hearing more about this COTS integration solution? Contact us for details at info@geo-nexus.com.
