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Gippsland Water is undertaking field verification of the details of customer water meters. The project entails field officers walking a “meter route” and inspecting the meters on relevant properties to verify their location, size and type. To assist the five field officers to collect the information efficiently, Gippsland Water contracted Spatial Vision to develop a custom mobile application using ESRI’s ArcPad.

The previous Customer Point dataset included a pseudo point representing water meters within a property, typically in the centre. A key functional requirement for the field application was the ability for officers to verify the location of water meters and record their true coordinates and position relevant to cadastral mapping. To support this role, Spatial Vision recommended the purchase of differentially corrected GPS connected (via Bluetooth) to a Pocket PC. The GPS is used to record the physical location of the meter with an accuracy of 1-3 metres. The Pocket PC includes a custom ArcPad mapping application to enable the officer to visualise the meter against a cadastre backdrop and snap the meter to the GPS location.

Before going into the field, each officer selects a meter route that is loaded onto the Pocket PC. In the field, the officer activates the GPS and custom application on the Pocket PC which will centre the map over the GPS location. The custom application allows editing of existing meters, creation of new meters, and updating of text details. When meters are updated, they change colour to indicate that they have been edited. Back in the office, the captured data is synchronised with corporate databases.

Within a few weeks of operation of the application, field officers identified asset data anomalies and started to contribute to enhancing the asset data management and the billing system in general. Gippsland Water is responsible for the provision of high quality water, wastewater and waste recovery services to Central Gippsland in Victoria and believes more accurate asset data will lead to better customer services.