Power and Water Corporation (PWC) is a government-owned corporation that transmits and distributes electricity, and provides water and sewerage services, across the Northern Territory of Australia.
In 2012 PWC implemented GIS and Maximo during their Asset Management Capability project. As part of this project implementation, GIS and Maximo were connected through a tightly coupled integration. Since this original project launch, improvement programs at PWC uncovered several pressing requirements to decouple these systems.
First, the tightly coupled integration inhibited PWC from upgrading both GIS and Maximo without significant risk and cost. Secondly, the custom integration was poorly designed which promoted data integrity issues and therefore a lack of trust in their data. Finally, the integration was difficult for both the technical and business teams to govern, manage, and make changes.
These issues led PWC to seek a dedicated integration system that would be platform agnostic and ensure future upgrades for GIS and Maximo could be completed with minimal risk.
The PWC team evaluated multiple options for their integration quandary.
The team also looked at developing an integration framework by leveraging a middleware platform. However, significant cost and inflexibility to scale made this approach unappealing.
Ultimately, they found a robust integration platform that met their needs, GeoWorx Sync. After performing a successful pilot project, PWC rolled out with a full implementation.
The GeoWorx Sync platform meets their requirements providing reports for data integrity, a user interface for easy management as well as the flexibility to upgrade external systems at will.
The implementation of GeoWorx Sync at PWC has been an overall success. Data integration rules were put into place to help manage data definitions and rules that govern the flow and integrity of shared data.
GeoWorx Sync has also decoupled GIS and Maximo. PWC has already been able to move ahead with upgrading their GIS systems – something that has been long overdue. They are also in the early stages of planning their Maximo upgrade.
Geonexus would like to thank Jon Yen at Power Water Corporation for his help with this article. If you are interested in learning more about this project or discussing your needs for data integration reach out to info@geo-nexus.com.
