Las Vegas Valley Water District (LVVWD) is the primary water provider for the City of Las Vegas and portions of unincorporated Clark County, Nevada. The District serves approximately 1.7 million residents across 300 square miles and manages more than 7,300 miles of pipeline, 55 pumping stations, 84 reservoir basins and tanks, and more than 44,000 fire hydrants.
GIS has played a role in LVVWD operations for decades. By the time Jimmy Bowden, Senior GIS Developer, joined the District in 2006, the GIS environment was already mature and broadly used. Today, more than 600 users, roughly 40% of the LVVWD workforce, access GIS each month to support operations, planning, asset management, and decision-making.
For more than 20 years, LVVWD relied on a legacy Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) to support work management and labor and materials tracking. While the system dispatched crews and tracked work, it had become difficult to modernize. Vendor changes created uncertainty around long-term support, enhancements were hard to make, and the system had no web access and minimal field experience.
A key limitation was how work was recorded across the distribution network. Crews could only log activities against broad geographic areas rather than specific assets. GIS had to become a de facto system of record for asset data.
“Our distribution crews were logging work against a geographic box, not a specific asset. You’re talking about thousands of potential assets in each box. We couldn’t say, ‘this valve has a problem.’ We could only say, ‘this area has a problem.’”— Jimmy Bowden, Senior GIS Developer, LVVWD
This approach made it challenging for LVVWD to maintain comprehensive asset-level maintenance histories, making it more difficult to identify recurring failures, evaluate lifecycle costs, and prioritize replacements.
In 2022, LVVWD began replacing its legacy CMMS with IBM Maximo EAM to enable stronger asset history, improved reporting, connected field workflows, and greater visibility into asset performance. The new platform would integrate with finance, procurement, HR, field solutions, and GIS to create a more unified and efficient asset management ecosystem.
Throughout the Maximo implementation, Jimmy and the GIS team worked closely with project team to integrate Maximo with the existing GIS ecosystem. By leveraging the organization’s trusted GIS asset data, editing workflows, and existing operational applications, the project team developed the data architecture and business processes necessary to ensure data consistency, interoperability, and seamless integration with the LVVWD’s GIS data.
LVVWD evaluated several integration products, including the Geonexus Integration Platform. While many of the other products offered connectivity with Maximo, they presented limitations in reporting capabilities and compatibility with LVVWD’s existing systems and business processes.
Geonexus emerged as the preferred solution because it natively supported both Esri and Maximo, provided configurable synchronization, and included active reporting that showed what was created, updated, orphaned, or misaligned.
A peer conversation with a neighboring water utility also helped LVVWD confirm their planned integration approach. The neighboring utility shared the challenges they encountered during implementing, the questions and concerns that were raised by their internal stakeholders, and the factors that ultimately led to their selection of Geonexus.
“It was a very enlightening session for our project team. Here was someone local to us, without any strings attached, explaining the challenges they had overcome. The rest of the team got on board quickly.”
LVVWD engaged Geonexus through a structured onboarding model designed to transfer knowledge rather than simply deliver a configured system. The GIS team worked alongside Geonexus to configure the connection between LVVWD’s systems, establish synchronization rules, and map.
LVVWD went live with the Geonexus integration in March 2026. The District could now synchronize GIS-maintained asset data into Maximo at scale, creating a foundation for asset-level work management, lifecycle analysis, reporting, and future predictive maintenance.
Field crews can now work against specific assets instead of broad geographic areas, which gives LVVWD better data for maintenance patterns, failure analysis, cost attribution, and capital planning. The integration also reduced the risk of data drift. LVVWD receives reporting that shows synchronization status and where exceptions need attention.
“In Maximo, the GIS synchronization logs were system logs, requiring elevated permissions and expertise. With Geonexus, I get a report that says: 100,000 valves in GIS, 100,000 in Maximo, two discrepancies, and we updated those. We get that every day, that’s confidence and trust.”
For LVVWD, the biggest lesson was flexibility. Modernization projects evolve, and the right integration approach needs to support both systems without forcing compromises.
Visibility also proved essential. Clear reporting gave LVVWD evidence that the integration was working.
With the GIS and Maximo integration in place, LVVWD is expanding its integration strategy across the enterprise. Field mobility is a major priority, along with reporting and analytics that turn operational data into meaningful information.
Geonexus saves asset-intensive organizations time and money by providing out-of-the-box, low-code/no-code integration tools that connect GIS data and applications with leading enterprise business systems. The fully configurable Geonexus Integration Platform speeds and simplifies integration by eliminating custom development, while ensuring data reliability and integrity. Geonexus helps organizations make the most of their geospatial and enterprise data, manage and scale integrations with ease, enhance operational efficiency and resilience, and feel confident they have full transparency into the consistent data view they need to make effective business decisions. To learn more, book a demo here.
