Client Success Story
Implementing a New Asset Management System
Bob Cook - Lower Murray Urban and Rural Water
Following the merging of the Sunraysia Rural and Lower Murray
water authorities last year to form Lower Murray Urban and
Rural Water, IT Consultant Bob Cook was given the task of
coordinating the team combining their disparate asset management
systems. The combined organisation, Lower Murray Urban and
Rural Water Authority (LMW) has its headquarters in Mildura
with assets and offices distributed along the Murray River.
The two original authorities served different markets, rural
and urban water services. The new organisation took over responsibility
for the supply of water for agricultural use to districts
along the River Murray and subsurface irrigation drainage
services, as well as urban water supply and wastewater services
for townships along the Murray River in Victoria, from Kerang
to Mildura.
The combined organisation has a substantial investment in
infrastructure and a mandated responsibility to report on
the value and performance of their assets each year. The challenge
facing LMW was to establish an integrated asset management
system that built on previous work but also took the organisation
forward. Bob’s integration project had two fundamental
issues to address: which GIS and Asset Management System (AMS)
should the authority adopt for the future, and how will they
bring all their asset data up to a similar level of reliability?
The previous Lower Murray Water had spent considerable effort
recording attributes for their plant and linear assets in
Hansen International’s Asset Management System (AMS)
and spatial records in one GIS system. In contrast, Sunraysia
Rural Water had been using another Works Management system
and had maintained spatial records in ESRI’s ArcView
3x software.
The integration project provided an opportunity to review
the organisation’s needs against the latest GIS technology
and so an assessment was undertaken of various GIS platforms.
Spatial Vision was invited to present the advantages of the
ESRI product range and recommended ESRI Australia’s
Enterprise View (EView) product. After extensive assessment
and testing, LMW have decided to implement an ESRI product
solution. Spatial Vision will commence software deployment
and skill transfer in April.
Given the investment and their satisfaction with the Hansen
International product, it was decided to begin the capture
and upgrading of the Sunraysia Rural Water assets and transfer
them into the existing Hansen AMS.
Converting and improving the completeness and reliability
of their existing data has proved to be a reasonably significant
project in its own right. LMW engaged Spatial Vision to help
them to address the data issues. The first stage involved
reviewing the available data and developing a target data
model that would support integration with Hansen’s AMS.
Subsequently, Spatial Vision’s team have worked closely
with Authority staff to convert existing ESRI shapefile and
mapped base data into a uniform geodatabase. The exercise
is more data improvement than just data conversion. The rural
data transfer is now almost complete. The next stage involves
converting the extensive urban GIS data into the new ESRI
geodatabase.
From a project management perspective, Bob says the major
issues for the project have been maintaining a handle on the
status of each of the project components being undertaken,
managing the organisational changes involved with the implementation
of new or changed systems and keeping the stakeholders informed.
LMW have expressed satisfaction and confidence in the work
being performed by Spatial Vision to date and have confirmed
this by engaging Spatial Vision for ongoing implementation
and training activities for their ESRI environment.
Copyright © Spatial Vision, Thursday, 24-March-2005
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