With a population rapidly nearing 900,000, Fort Worth, Texas, is the 15th largest city in the U.S. By 2020, the population is expected to surpass the one million mark. The explosive growth has placed added demands on the city’s Water Department, which currently provides water to 1.2 million people in the city and several surrounding communities. The utility manages about 7,000 miles of pipe for water distribution and wastewater collection.
The utility uses Esri® ArcGIS® to manage the geographic location of its infrastructure assets and IBM® Maximo for managing maintenance work and tracking asset condition. Wanting the ability to create and view work orders for a specific asset, the utility sought to integrate the two systems. Until now, work orders were associated only with a street address and not the specific location where the work needed to be done.
And that’s where the challenge came in. Water Department field operation workers required the ability to have high-quality maps with accurate and the most up-to-date information possible.
Always keeping the customer at the forefront, workers could see how having that information at their fingertips would improve response times and their ability to perform the task at hand. It would also mean eliminating the need for additional research and the time it would take to come into the office and pull maps and plans to find out what assets are in the area.
Fort Worth contracted with Geonexus® to evaluate GeoWorx® integration platform for Maximo. After a short evaluation period, the utility decided to implement GeoWorx Sync for data loading and synchronization and GeoWorx Office for mapping and analysis.
Jeff Ryan, GIS manager for the Fort Worth Water Department, said Geonexus and GeoWorx met their integration needs.
GeoWorx Sync provides backend integration between GIS and Maximo systems, ensuring data integrity and helping the utility make informed asset management decisions. It also ensures that common asset and work order information is up-to-date and accurate in both systems, which is especially critical for the utility’s field operations.
GeoWorx Office provides Fort Worth’s field operations crews with a common map-centric platform for viewing both GIS features and Maximo data and being able to correlate the two as needed. The application also provides work management capabilities that will allow the city to create work against specified assets. Moreover, the application plugs into ArcGIS Online, a platform the utility has used for four years.
Geonexus would like to thank co-author Sandra Baker and the team at Fort Worth for their help with this article. If you are interested in learning more about the Fort Worth project or the GeoWorx platform, please reach out to info@geo-nexus.com.
