The Cobb County Water System, located in Marietta, Georgia, distributes water to over 190,000 residents and businesses, manages 2,900 miles of water main, and operates and maintains approximately 2,500 miles of sanitary sewer lines. Cobb County Water System also maintains four water reclamation facilities and 38 pump stations.
With thousands of miles of water main and sanitary sewer line, dozens of pump stations, and four waste reclamation facilities, Cobb County Water System has a lot of assets to track, maintain, and support. In 2007, they adopted IBM Maximo for asset and work order management. Five years later, in need of an Esri ArcGIS – Maximo integration solution, Cobb County Water decided to upgrade Maximo and implement Maximo Spatial. Turns out, this method of integrating their geospatial and asset data would prove hugely challenging…
Cobb County Water System struggled with Maximo Spatial for over a year, and never could get the IBM – GIS integration solution to work for them. Despite engineering several adjustments to their GIS and Maximo environment and having discussions with top-level Spatial engineers, Spatial was never able to complete full runs or sweeps of Cobb County Water’s designated assets.
Post-Spatial implementation and failure, Cobb eventually gave up the idea of integration and moved forward without an integration solution for nearly a decade. By 2020, Cobb County Water System’s GIS and Maximo systems were almost a decade out of sync. Though maintenance and work was happening in the field, it wasn’t being reflected in both systems. With systems out of sync, Cobb County Water System couldn’t fully close out over 1,600 work order and maintenance requests, complicating quarterly and annual reporting. Plus, with neither system up-to-date, both asset management and GIS teams wasted precious labor hours trying to locate or create information that already existed.
After struggling with Maximo Spatial and trudging along with no integration for several years, Cobb County Water System knew they needed a new integration solution—one that worked. Having previous experience with Geonexus CEO and CTO, Skip Heise and Jeremy Wolfe, Cobb County Water knew Geonexus was a solution they could trust. In 2020, they decided to implement Geonexus’ integration platform for Maximo – GIS integration.
The Water System took a rare, but highly effective, route during Geonexus implementation. Instead of assigning one team or one team member—GIS or Maximo—to learn and administer the Geonexus tool, they decided to share admin duties among administrators on both teams, significantly speeding up the implementation process. Plus, because the Geonexus Integration Platform is meant to be run and owned by organizations as a Citizen Integrator enabled tool, Cobb County’s approach helped two administrators get up to speed with the tool. Ultimately, what was scheduled to be a 6-week implementation was reduced by 2 weeks with the tag-team effort.
“The greatest testament I can give [Geonexus] is, as designed, we finally took the hand-off. And, I think it happened very organically. It was really one-of-those ‘lightbulb goes off’ [moments], which I know is the goal of Geonexus—to get you to a point, hand you the tool, and you administer it. That is a true testament to your company values.”
-Jeff Campbell, Technical Applications Manager, Cobb County Water System
With Geonexus software in place running weekly syncs of data between Maximo and GIS, Cobb County Water System finally has up-to-date data in both systems. Every time a synchronization is run, the Geonexus tool produces data quality reports identifying any creates, duplicates, discrepancies, and more, so data issues can be resolved quickly.
This synchronization schedule and reporting alone has solved Cobb County Water System’s data integrity and data quality issues that arose during the almost decade of running unintegrated systems. What’s more, they are now slowly working through those 1,600 work order requests to finally close them out of the Maximo system. Plus, despite recently implementing the tool, with less manual entry and less possibility of human error, Cobb County Water is already seeing productivity and efficiency gains.
Geonexus’ productized connectors for Esri ArcGIS – IBM Maximo integration were built with business logic in mind. To learn how the Geonexus Integration Platform can connect your Esri GIS and Maximo systems, schedule a personalized demo here: www.geo-nexus.com/request-a-demo.
