We’re at DistribuTECH this week, where more than 13,500 leaders in the utility fields are talking about the transformation of energy exchange. An ever-changing technology landscape offers new and exciting opportunities for utility organizations. Yet even with increased access to innovation, many organizations find themselves grappling with legacy systems, inefficient processes, and information silos that can be difficult to overcome.

When the city fathers of Independence, Missouri, fired up their first power plant in 1901, electrical power was considered leading-edge technology. More than 115 years later, Independence Power and Light (IPL) found itself managing operations with an inefficient system that had some catching up to do with the cutting-edge technologies on the horizon.

The municipal utility’s primary challenge was integrating a diverse software landscape that supported material assemblies, material reservation, and workflow data and scheduling. So, they decided to work with POWER Engineers to implement a GIS-centric work management system that integrated their enterprise solutions and streamlined workflows. 

The goals for this integrated system included: 

• Eliminating duplicate data entry
• Tracking jobs from start to finish
• Checking accuracy of estimates
• Formalizing and simplifying workflows
• Providing access field employees access to work orders 

With the new system, Cityworks is used to manage work activities and facilitate information exchange between the systems, from project inception to financial closeout. As a result of the new system, IPL was able to capture valuable asset management data from more than 15,000 work orders in a little over four months—without needing to hire additional staff. 

Janna Weir, IPL systems program supervisor, recently joined us for a webinar to showcase the enterprise implementation and share tips for organizations considering a CMMS upgrade of their own. Watch the webinar:

We did it. We implemented and went live with Cityworks for our wastewater collection system and treatment plant. We migrated from three asset registries and two CMMS to one. Breathe in, breathe out. It feels so good!

Let’s check the box because the job is done. Right?

Well, hopefully not.

Implementation is just the first step in developing a sustainable asset management system that improves the quality of maintenance planning, increases staff efficiency, and supports decision-making.

We made common configurations and improvements during our implementation, such as adding universal custom fields and modifying XMLs. However, as we approached and moved past “go-live,” it became clear we could further improve the usability of Cityworks. Without successful adoption and use by our frontline staff, we’d still be collecting incomplete data, fraught with inconsistencies and inaccuracies—inevitably providing misleading information to our decision makers.

So, how do we increase our potential to properly use our new CMMS? By focusing on the experience of frontline staff. Sorry, managers, your reports can wait. Besides, what’s a report with bad data?

Our first ongoing improvement goals fell into two main categories: functionality and infrastructure enhancement. Here are a few examples of improvements we made for our treatment plant users.

Functional

We recognized early in our implementation that staff struggled to search the 94 different treatment plant asset classes when creating a work order. So, we decided to use the Entity Lookup tool to simplify the process. With some FME (Feature Manipulation Engine) scripting and a little JavaScript, we turned this tool into an enterprise quick asset search for creating attached work orders.

The FME script populates the entity identifier table with our equipment numbers and asset EUIDs, while the JavaScript requires the user to search a valid equipment number before creating the attached work order.

We also realized the staff needed to see identifying asset attributes in their inbox. Our staff often plan work order schedules based on attached assets in their assigned work, but they couldn’t see asset attributes in their search results or inbox. To address this, we populated the asset’s Address field with its number and name, which is then duplicated in the work order’s WO Address field under Location Information. This allows staff to see asset information in their inboxes and plan their work without needing to open each work order.

Infrastructure

In our legacy asset registry, all assets were stored in one asset class. Yes, you read that right. One. It made searching easy, but it wasn’t an ideal registry.When we migrated to Cityworks, we went live with 94 asset classes. Staff had focused on discrete rather than generalized functions, leaving us, for example, with five asset classes for HVAC and eleven for instruments. This level of parsing increased the administrative burden of managing the registry and proved clumsy when searching for assets.

Suddenly, we were on the other extreme of having too many asset classes.

The solution was clear: consolidate asset classes. After meeting with maintenance staff to refine our categories, we used FME to merge asset classes. We also improved the use of the Type field in our asset table schema and updated the attached assets of all existing affected work orders.

We manually reconciled existing work orders with the consolidated asset classes, updating the work order templates, custom fields, and relationship classes. Now, we operate with 72 asset classes. This simplification benefits the users, Cityworks admins, and the GIS staff.

Additionally, we first implemented Cityworks with most of our asset classes as objects since we did not have their spatial information. However, there are limitations to assets stored as non-spatial objects. For example:

1. The parent feature of the asset is added to every work order
2. The work order cost is split between all attached assets unless manually adjusted
3. You cannot use the map to locate an asset without the hierarchy
4. The xy of the work order is the centroid of the parent feature
5. And work order event layers are stacked with other work orders at the feature’s centroid

Our solution? In the FME model used to consolidate assets, we also called a python script that gave each asset the xy value of its parent feature, converting the object tables to feature classes. We then manually moved each asset point to its correct spatial location. Now, we are officially operating a GIS-centric asset management system.

The glow of finishing an implementation can quickly fade once you see the system’s use in the real world. This is not a set-it-ad-forget-it system, but no true asset management model should be. The proper use of Cityworks must be fostered through ongoing training, relationship building, and working with staff to improve tools and processes. Our ability to improve the usability of Cityworks keeps staff engaged and invested in the continuous improvement process.

By Ian Morales, GIS Analyst, Central Contra Costa Sanitary District, Martinez, California

In communities across the U.S. and Canada, pet licenses provide a valuable system for keeping tabs on our four-legged friends. When pet licenses are managed effectively, they not only help reunite lost pets with their humans—they also help municipalities track health and safety concerns. However, many pet license systems rely on cumbersome forms and processes that make data hard to share.

With the help of Cityworks and ArcGIS, the City of Racine developed a solution that not only tracks animal cases internally but also shares information with other departments.

Racine has been a Cityworks user since 2009, when the Public Works Department first implemented Cityworks AMS. In 2011, the Racine Building Department adopted Cityworks PLL. Since then, many processes that were tracked in either an Excel sheet or an Access database have been migrated to Cityworks. Cityworks is now used in almost every department, including the Health Department.

The Racine Health Department manages permits and licenses for bees, chickens, ferrets, and potbelly pigs—but the most common licenses issued are for cats and dogs. Each dog or cat case includes:

• Tag numbers
• Previous year tag numbers
• Animal name
• Gender
• Primary and secondary breed
• Color
• Neuter/spay status
• Rabies serial number
• Vaccination/expiration date

Each licensed animal has its own PLL case. All fees associated with the animal are recorded within the case, and categories such as ISSUED, CLOSED, DECEASED, MOVED, and EXPIRED help track the status of the license.

Each case is also tied to the tax parcel map layer by owner name and address. Because the pet cases are geocoded, staff across several departments can easily visualize and share valuable information.

For example, when the city receives a report of an animal bite or attack, they create a dangerous animal case. If the animal in question already has a pet license on file, the dangerous animal case is linked to the license. If not, the owner is required to register the animal so the issue can be monitored. This information helps protect code enforcement staff who may be walking around properties with a known dangerous animal. Employees can simply reference the map to stay informed, aware, and safe.  

The Police Department, which handles animal protection and control, also uses the geodata. They can run a report to search for a street name, owner name, or pet tag number to identify animals and contact owners.

Several aspects of Cityworks PLL have helped improve customer service. For example, a “renew” task has been configured so the city can keep track of license renewal dates, and the city runs an automated email campaign through MailChimp to help notify owners about upcoming renewals. The city also developed an expired case report that gets printed and mailed to each owner notifying them of expired animal tags. Although it may seem costly to print upwards of 1,000 expired notices each year, the city has found this process highly effective for encouraging license renewals.

The city also configured an inbox specifically for expired cases. Now, when pet owners stop by the office to renew expired licenses, they no longer have to wait for staff to track down the records. The inbox helps staff quickly and easily locate the appropriate case. A Cityworks account was also created for the Racine Humane Society to give adoption customers access to on-site, same-day pet licensing.

With the help of a GIS-centric licensing and code enforcement platform, Racine transformed a complex process into a transparent enterprise system that empowers and protects the community.

By Jacob Pitsch, programmer, City of Racine, Wisconsin

In the fall of 2016, the City of Auburn Fleet Services Division faced a major problem: the antiquated vehicle management system in use since the mid-1990s was rapidly deteriorating to the point of being unusable. The system was years out of support and required obsolete software such as Windows 2000 and Access 95. A new solution needed to be found.  

Cityworks was the natural choice as a replacement system, as it was already being used by many other departments. Moving Fleet Services into Cityworks aligned with existing plans to leverage Cityworks as the enterprise asset and work order management system for the entire organization. The GIS Division worked with Fleet to develop a Cityworks solution that broke down informational silos and significantly streamlined the process of dispatching and competing work orders.

Shifting Gears

The old solution relied on mechanics filling out paperwork order forms. Upon work completion, administrative staff would manually transcribe the paper forms into the asset management system.

Now, when vehicles arrive for service, administrative staff create Cityworks work orders with the appropriate repair tasks. Mechanics stay connected with tablets, which immediately notify them when work orders are assigned. Once repairs are complete, the finished work orders are automatically routed to the supervisor for review and closing.

“One of the major benefits we’ve seen with Cityworks is the mechanics spend less time between the shop and office now that work orders are delivered straight to their tablets,” said Kevin Callahan, Fleet Services Division manager.

The old system also suffered from information silos in the vehicle and parts inventory. However, the Cityworks open database structure allows for easy integration with other systems. Fleet Services opted to make their financial system the single, authoritative vehicle inventory. A script developed by the GIS team exports vehicle data nightly to a flat table in the GIS database, which Cityworks consumes as assets. Fleet staff use the GIS search in Cityworks as their main portal for vehicle searching and work order creation.

The financial system is also the authoritative parts inventory, and an existing integration developed by Timmons Group pushes updated records to Cityworks Storeroom on a nightly interval. As parts are consumed for repairs, Storeroom allows the parts technician to easily issue material to the work order. A custom export developed by GIS staff runs weekly to export all consumed materials back to the financial system.

Full Throttle

Once the Cityworks design proved stable over the course of several months, the final step of the implementation was to migrate work history for active vehicles. GIS developers wrote a script using the Cityworks API, which was used to import over 21,000 historical records into Cityworks as closed work orders. Fleet now has a one-stop shop in Cityworks for all active vehicle information.

The city has seen great improvements in reporting capabilities since changing to the new system. GIS Division staff wrote custom SQL reports that query Cityworks along with the city’s fuel management and financial systems to report lifetime vehicle costs, monthly repair totals for each department, and schedules for preventative vehicle maintenance. Previously, departments were assigned a specific month to bring vehicles to the shop for service regardless of need. Now when a vehicle meets odometer or time thresholds for service, it is automatically flagged in a SQL report. The report queries Cityworks and the Fuel Master system for the most recent odometer record for each vehicle. The vehicles that need service are then compiled in a list that is auto-emailed to Fleet staff.

The city has saved over $11,000 annually with Cityworks. Perhaps even more significantly, the streamlined workflows have helped staff handle the demands of a growing fleet with minimal impact. For example, the fleet parts technician reports time savings of up to 50 percent now that the need to transpose paper records to the computer has been eliminated.

After the success of the fleet management project, the city is excited to extend their use of Cityworks. A project is currently underway to move Fire Division truck inspections into Cityworks, allowing Fleet to receive an immediate notification when a repair is needed. The team also plans to implement an automatic vehicle location (AVL) system, which will allow repair alerts to be sent automatically from the vehicle to Cityworks in real time.

Armed with Cityworks API, a talented GIS team, and an organizational vision for ongoing improvements, the City of Auburn is a leading example of effective enterprise asset management.

By Britt Johnson, GIS business analyst, City of Auburn

At the 2019 Esri® Partner Conference in Palm Springs, Calif., Esri president and CEO Jack Dangermond presented Cityworks® with two awards: Partnering for Success and Going Global by Staying Local.

“I’m honored to have the opportunity to provide recognition to those partners that have gone above and beyond to apply GIS to some of the toughest issues our customers face today, and lay the groundwork for a brighter future,” said Dangermond.

Going Global by Staying Local recognizes the strategic, targeted approach used by Cityworks and Esri distributors when collaborating with joint clients. Together, Cityworks and Esri distributors support local government, public works, and utility clients in seven countries around the globe.

Partnering for Success jointly recognizes Cityworks and UtiliSync for their partnership in solving client needs through technology and collaboration. By combining the flexible inspection forms of UtiliSync with the GIS-centric reporting and analytical capabilities of Cityworks, municipal organizations enjoy an expanded public asset management solution to better plan and simplify work, prioritize problems, analyze and inform asset management plans, and meet organizational objectives.

“We work hard to foster an engaged and motivated community of partners who use ArcGIS to help communities become more resilient, sustainable, and safe,” said Brian Haslam, president and CEO of Cityworks. “Our technology platform is designed as a pure-play ArcGIS solution for public asset management, and our most successful partners are also creating differentiated solutions for a GIS-centric environment.”

Cityworks has been recognized repeatedly for outstanding achievements and top-level performance and is currently among a small, distinguished group of Esri Platinum Partners.

When Collier County had a “vision” to deploy a tool that would standardize asset management across all its departments, officials knew there was only one way to get there. By expanding its relationship with Cityworks, Florida’s largest county was able to get serious about implementing an efficient program to manage the government’s varied resources.

The county’s relationship with Cityworks began in 2014, when it contracted with Woolpert to provide planning, design, configuration, and deployment of an enterprise-class Cityworks Asset Management System (AMS) for Collier County’s Public Utilities Department.

The full-scale implementation project was comprised of five specific tracks: GIS-based asset management, GIS-based inventory and work order management, GIS-based integration of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) data, GIS-based customer management, and capital improvement program (CIP) budget generation at short- and long-term intervals. The project went live in 2016, enabling end users to operate and maintain the county’s potable water, re-use water, and wastewater systems.

“The utilities department is a logical place to start any municipal implementation because that department usually has the most complex issues,” said John Cestnick, Woolpert project manager. “They typically manage multiple facilities spread across a wide geographical area, and efficient operations are of great importance to the public.”

Collier County Cityworks administrators found unique ways to personalize Cityworks for their needs. For example, when Dustin DeBres, Collier County’s senior programmer analyst and Cityworks administrator, saw that creating a new user account required up to 40 clicks, he said, “There’s a way you can do this and save time.”

While they still must create user accounts manually, Collier County automated account management by creating four buttons that allow user-specific permissions. If a user doesn’t have permission to close a work order, the automation prevents him or her from closing it. If a user is no longer employed with the county, one button will remove all access instead of having to manually remove each access.

“It makes account creation more uniform, prevents problems, and avoids human error,” said DeBres.

Collier County also has written code that allows for color notification when a job is completed, changing from red to green; shows the name of an employee’s department instead of a number code; and can even identify what type of incident may have caused a water main break.

DeBres, who has been in IT for 18 years, said Collier County didn’t do anything revolutionary. He said officials just thought, “Hey, we can do better.”

Collier County now is expanding the program, working with Woolpert to implement Cityworks for all county-owned facilities and parks, replacing a lightweight and ineffective management tool. According to Cestnick, Woolpert’s partnership with Collier County has been successful because the county’s vision was to deploy a standardized asset and work management system across all county departments and prove the value of the system.

“They gave us very clear directions on the output we had to get from the system, so in turn, it drove the way we configured the system,” Cestnick said.

Current and future Cityworks deployments within Collier County, including Facilities and Public Services Department projects, are leveraging a hybrid Woolpert and Collier County implementation. Woolpert staff are facilitating the geodatabase design activities and leading the Cityworks AMS planning, design, and configuration tasks. Collier County’s internal Cityworks support staff will take over from there, performing user acceptance testing, training, and deployment activities. Cestnick said it was a testament to Woolpert’s implementation approach and the skillset of the county that the knowledge could be transferred for the second half of the project.

By doing the second half of this implementation themselves, Collier County will incur less capital expense and can use existing resources—their AMS-trained employees—who are already on the payroll. It also allows the county to pace future implementations, taking into consideration the timeline of other ongoing projects. And it builds the domain expertise among county staff, who are ultimately responsible for maintaining the system.

“Woolpert has the expertise when it comes to implementing Cityworks, but I need my staff to own the product after Woolpert is gone,” said Jeff Dunham, Collier County’s technical systems operations manager. “By taking responsibility for final delivery of the product, it provides for a learning experience that cannot be taught in a classroom and rewards our team members with a satisfying sense of ownership.”

Read: Collier County to Go Live with Expansive Asset Management Implementation

By Ed Singer, PE, MIAM, Woolpert Program Director

In terms of assets, the Milwaukee County Zoo is one of Wisconsin’s finest. Nearly double the span of San Diego’s renowned zoo at 190 acres, the Milwaukee County Zoo hosts 1.3 million people each year, making it the third-highest attended attraction in the state.

Like most modern zoos established in the late nineteenth century, the Milwaukee County Zoo began as a collection of animals displayed for entertainment and to expand the public’s knowledge of the world. Now, however, their mission has evolved to promote an appreciation for all animals and to support conservation of their diverse habitats.

The zoo’s commitment to conservation doesn’t end with species and habitats, though. Taking care of what they have extends to every aspect of their 600,000 square feet of building space and the millions of dollars of equipment that keep the zoo safe and comfortable for patrons, staff, and the 2,191 animals who live there.

That’s one reason why, in 2016, Milwaukee County decided to extend the success of a Cityworks implementation at their international airport and highway division across their enterprise. John Westrich, director of grounds and maintenance, couldn’t have been happier. He’d seen the improvement in the work order and asset management process at the airport and was eager to begin the transition from manual paper forms to a much more efficient and accurate software system.

Because of the scope and diversity of the zoo’s assets and processes, Westrich knew the conversion wouldn’t happen overnight. The animals’ information is managed in ZIMS, a unified global database. But data on nearly everything else—including the electric substation, the 28,000-gallon aquarium, the 60-year-old steam engine train, the animal health center, and the life support system for every animal—would require conversion and migration from a tabular form into a digital GIS data model.

Discovery Channels

POWER Engineers’ consultants kicked off the project with an enterprise-wide discovery phase to establish a mutual understanding of the county’s current state of work and asset management. By conducting departmental business process reviews, workshops, GIS data reviews, and project planning activities, the combined POWER and county team arrived at a detailed implementation plan for execution and deployment of Cityworks county-wide, including the zoo.

This phase of the project revealed priorities for the zoo that included accurate tracking of preventative maintenance for 400 asset types, classification of work orders, and the establishment of an authoritative system of record for all work activities and costs. Westrich’s department accomplishes a diversity of tasks, including food delivery to the animals, waste removal, animal transportation, special event support and maintenance of a property large enough to hold 30 Superdomes. Thousands of those tasks are currently requested with “pink sheets” and tracked with their carbon copy mates, a process that begged for modernization.

Each day, zookeeper, veterinary, administration, concession, and special event staff submit requests for facility and grounds service. To streamline the input process, POWER created a wizard-driven website that allows users to select the area, building, or room of concern to identify the type of issue and to provide comments. The requests are then routed into Cityworks for evaluation and action. The website also allows the user to check the status of their requests in real time.

Better data on the maintenance, repair, and replacement of big-ticket equipment will also be helpful come budgeting season. Readily-available, accurate information will provide Westrich evidence to justify the actual cost of new equipment purchases in his budget.

Value Beyond Budgeting

Officials outside the zoo have already taken notice of the GIS-centric records captured in Cityworks. To maintain its Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) accreditation, the zoo is evaluated by recognized experts in the profession. Every five years the facility and staff are measured against established standards and best practices. Fewer than 10 percent of the approximately 2,800 animal exhibitors licensed by the United States Department of Agriculture are AZA accredited. The Milwaukee County Zoo has been accredited since 1976—when its oldest resident, Onassis the Amazon River turtle, was in her early 40s.

When AZA inspectors visited in July, Patricia Simmons, the director of the North Carolina Zoo, took notice of the implementation underway at Milwaukee County. She devoted an afternoon to exploring the features of the software and discussing it with Westrich. He shared that the GIS-based, comprehensive features of Cityworks make it a better solution for his needs than zoo-specific software he’d seen on the market.

“When it comes to technology, sometimes zoos are known to be behind the times,” Westrich said. Modernizing our work processes and critical information with Cityworks will be useful not only to this zoo but others too, as we share the details of our implementation with our fellow AZA members. Every dollar we save operationally moves us closer to our conservation goals for the species in our care.”

Once deployed, end users will enjoy greater efficiency in their work. The project includes training workshops for staff run by POWER technical lead Bill Hoisington and senior consultant Lee Halbrook.

“Because of Cityworks’ user-friendly interface, time spent training has been fairly brief, even considering the big leap employees are making from a paper system,” said Hoisington.

The full implementation will be completed this fall. Once accomplished, the POWER team will have repeated the process across six other county departments, including facility management, corrections, parks, transit, fleet, and economic development, making Milwaukee County an even smarter place to live and visit.

There has never been a more demanding time for municipalities. Thanks to an “always on” world, residents and contractors increasingly expect immediate access to accurate information and quality service. Public leaders, too, are demanding better engagement tools for their constituents. From permitting and inspections to licensing and regulatory requirements, civic professionals are turning to Cityworks PLL to automate business services and inform decision making.

Cityworks PLL continues to expand as a leader in helping communities streamline their PLL processes. Previously, Public Access allowed Cityworks users to create customizable landing pages that enable residents and contractors to request inspections. With the release of Public Access 4.0 in 2018, business owners, residents, and internal staff can now directly schedule upcoming inspections themselves—further easing the administrative burden on organizations.

This new feature is easy to configure and use.

First, the administrator needs to set up the inspectors and time blocks available to be scheduled.

The screenshot below shows the configuration for an electrical inspection. We configured two generalized blocks of time for scheduled inspections: morning from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and afternoon from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

In this next screenshot, you can see the workload schedule for Inspector J. Electric. In this example, J. Electric can do inspections any time during the work week except Friday afternoons.

Now, when end users schedule inspections in Public Access, they may choose a morning or afternoon block according to the inspector’s availability.

Alternately, an inspection may be set up for an approximate time. This works best for inspections where timing is critical, such as an inspection following a concrete pour. In this case, the Public Access user would see what times are available and be able to choose accordingly.

After the users have scheduled their inspections, they receive an email or text message notification. Each notification includes the details of the scheduled inspection, as well as an optional calendar appointment. The Cityworks administrator may configure the information included in the notification. Finally, when inspectors log in to Cityworks to check assignments, they will also see inspections scheduled through Public Access.

Navigating government services can be daunting for both internal and external users. With the help of Cityworks PLL and Public Access 4.0, local governments and utilities can make their services more accessible to the public while also easing the administrative burden on internal staff.

By Cara Haslam, Cityworks subject matter expert.

Water distribution organizations are tasked with more than just the reliable delivery of clean, safe water. They also need to manage and care for the infrastructure itself. Whether you’re rehabilitating, replacing, or simply fixing your assets, extending their lifespan in the safest, most cost-effective way possible is a valuable goal.

Age-based replacement, although it can be tangibly analyzed, isn’t always the most effective method for prioritizing asset replacement. While age can often be an indicator of condition and relative remaining lifespan, it can also create false positives. An 80-year-old pipe, free of any maintenance history, may be very sound now and for years to come. Meanwhile, a five-year-old pipe in the same system might require constant maintenance. Which pipe would you choose to rehab or replace first?

Other variables need to be considered together, such as material and soil type. For example, a 2018 study found that cast iron pipes located in highly corrosive soils fail at a rate 20 percent higher than cast iron pipes in low corrosion soils.

These anomalies can make prioritization seem like an art or an educated guess rather than something that can be tangibly measured. When you’re looking at an entire system worth of data, it can be a daunting task to effectively prioritize capital improvement projects. However, there is a way to take control of all these variables and apply a standardized methodology to your decision-making.

Here’s what you need:

• Geographic information system (GIS)
• Computerized maintenance management system (CMMS)
• Institutional knowledge (gut feel)
• A model for calculating risk

Geographic Information System (GIS)

Over the course of the last few decades, the utility industry has increasingly invested in GIS as the asset repository. A robust geodatabase allows organizations to create an authoritative record of the locations and attributes of all its assets. This geospatial infrastructure lays the groundwork for location intelligence, and it can also tie into other business tools like modeling, billing, meter, SCADA, and CMMS software solutions.

Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS)

A CMMS can help you track any issues, complaints, and work being done throughout your utility network. A GIS-centric CMMS can do this without redundant asset data or syncing tools by using your geodatabase as your authoritative asset repository. When it comes to tracking information on water quality issues, for example, any associated work orders, labor, costs, and materials can be associated with the asset in the GIS. A good CMMS should also help you schedule preventative maintenance and conduct condition assessments. The more data you collect, the more insights you’ll gain into your operations and the health of your infrastructure.

Institutional Knowledge (Gut Feel)

It’s also important to capture existing institutional knowledge. None of today’s computerized systems go back to the early- or mid-1900s. As time has passed, so too have historical events and their history. Formalizing this undocumented knowledge can help with some of your more tangible analysis, as well.

Calculating Risk

Using an application like Cityworks Operational Insights, all of these inputs can be aggregated into manageable values and used to help inform your decisions. Operational Insights can be configured to use your GIS and CMMS data to calculate the Probability of Failure (PoF), Consequence of Failure (CoF) and Business Risk Exposure (BRE) values.

The PoF represents how likely it is that an asset will fail. As I mentioned before, this value isn’t totally dependent on age. Variables like age, condition, material, diameter, and break history can all contribute to this calculation.

CoF associates a value with the results of any given asset failure. These results would include not just the financial expense of direct repair and collateral damage, but also any social, environmental, or legal costs. A break in a large water main that serves tens of thousands of people downstream would have a much different CoF value than a small main that serves a few homes in a cul-de-sac.

BRE is the product of these two values (CoF * PoF = BRE), and it represents the overall risk of the asset. BRE identifies those assets that are not only more likely to fail but also carry a higher consequence of failure. The weight of these data points could be adjusted based on locale or the history of the network, allowing you to use data to account for and further explore institutional knowledge. For example, if a veteran employee who’s been with the organization for 40 years knows that the mains in the southeast end of town tend to act up more than others, you can dig into what may be causing that and weigh those inputs appropriately.

You can take into account the maintenance history on the asset. This will tell you if you are over-maintaining or under-maintaining your assets from both a preventative and reactive perspective. If the data shows that you’re constantly doing point repairs on high BRE assets, it might be time to prioritize those assets for rehab or replacement in the capital budget.

Most importantly, since all of these assets are housed in the GIS, they can be spatially viewed and analyzed to discover patterns. They can also be viewed as a heat map to easily see hot and cold spots in your network. Additional spot inspections to ground-truth some of the analytical results can be performed to assure accuracy.

With the help of these four tools, you can begin to develop a risk-based prioritization approach to managing your assets—enabling your organization to work smarter to create a safer and more reliable water network for your community.

By Josh Stroessner, Cityworks business development manager.

To the casual observer, the 275,000 travelers who pass through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) each day seem solely focused on getting from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Many of those traveling through the world’s busiest airport may not realize that, thanks to the ATL Airport Art Program, they are also walking through some of the most award-winning art exhibits in Georgia.

The mission of the ATL Art Program is to develop and integrate art, exhibits, and performances into the fabric of the airport for the benefit of passengers and employees. The Art Program has three major components: commissioning artists to create site-specific artwork, presenting rotating exhibitions, and scheduling performing arts series. Each part of the program strives to meet ATL’s goal of becoming the world’s best airport by exceeding customer expectations.

Anyone who has experienced these exhibits can attest to their impressiveness. A great deal of work is needed to maintain this level of service and, as a result, the Art Program needed a way to manage their assets in the most efficient way possible.

Caring for Valuable Assets

Managing art exhibits is not as straightforward as one might think, especially for exhibits that rotate from space to space, terminal to terminal. When was an exhibit placed? When is that exhibit due to be rotated? Where is the art inventory currently located? These are just a few examples of the information the Art Program needed to track as part of their day-to-day asset management. On top of that, it’s not just the art pieces themselves that need to be managed but also the configuration of floor spaces and exhibit cases, as well as the maintenance of infrastructure to ensure an area is functionally sufficient to properly display the exhibit.

The ATL Art Program traditionally tracked placement and maintenance activities with a series of spreadsheets and paper documents. However, as the variety and scale of the art assets grew, so did the need for a more consolidated and efficient way of managing them. The Art Program needed a better solution. With the help of GISinc, they determined that Cityworks best fit their needs.

Rotating Lifecycles

During the summer of 2017, GISinc worked with ATL to implement Cityworks Server AMS for both the art and signage departments. The approach included not only the installation and configuration of Cityworks, but also the configuration of a GIS infrastructure to accommodate the data needed to visualize the spatial distribution of the program’s assets.

In some ways, the ATL configuration is not very different than the way most Cityworks users track water, sewer, or street assets. Service request templates track any reported issues with the exhibits and exhibit spaces; work order templates track the installation, repair, and reinstallation of those exhibits; and inspection templates ensure the displays are kept in proper working order.

Cityworks helps the Art Program track the costs associated with maintaining the art exhibits, as well as the fabrication costs for new exhibit cases and supporting infrastructure. Work order templates even track the creation of promotional materials and brochures for each art exhibit.

Cityworks is being used to monitor the full lifecycle of each exhibit—from the time it is received, throughout its time on display, and finally to its removal. Where this differs from many other asset types is that the asset’s lifecycle can restart with its redeployment to another area within the airport. Once that occurs, the same work process is used, allowing the art department to get a holistic view of each asset within its inventory. 

On the Horizon

The Art Program, with the help of the ATL GIS department, is currently developing a work process to better track the whereabouts of art exhibit assets not on display. This process will involve action items within the Cityworks application, as well as work processes performed within the GIS to update the asset status and allow the user to easily identify what is currently deployed versus what is held in reserve for future use.

The Art Program also hopes to expand the use of Cityworks to support their procurement. This would include tasks that track the commissioning of art exhibits, communication with the artists, and the recording of financial interactions during that process.

As the Art Program grows, Cityworks will be there to help its users manage their assets in the most efficient way possible, allowing the team to focus on the art itself and on creating a more enjoyable experience for the many travelers who pass through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport each day.

By Thomas Wilson, GISP, Cityworks Architect, Geographic Information Services, Inc. (GISinc)

It has been 31 years since I attended my first Esri Partner Conference (EPC). The EPC has always been an important event on my calendar, and I have many fond memories of witnessing the transformation of GIS and its impact on the world. Perhaps the greatest value of EPC is the opportunity to be taught and inspired by Jack Dangermond and Esri staff while forging lasting relationships with other Esri partners.

This year, the resounding theme at EPC was the importance of our customers and the work they do in their communities. Jack shared his vision of GIS, the Science of Where, and the transformative impact that location intelligence will have on every aspect of life. His comments were, as always, inspiring and thought-provoking.

I wanted to share a few of the standout points he made:

• We are part of an increasingly complex world.
• The pace of change is accelerating at an unprecedented pace as constituents demand more.
• We facilitate collaboration through the Science of Where®, leveraging the power of GIS and location intelligence.
• GIS technology is in the best place ever. Solutions are expanding, easier to use and implement, and more affordable.
• The geospatial infrastructure—GIS mapping, content, and platforms—are advancing rapidly thanks to a union of diverse technologies that create value for users.
• The web GIS platform is driving this transformation because it is accessible, pervasive, and interconnected; it supports workflows; and it provides meaningful insight for ongoing improvement.
• The ArcGIS system of engagement, system of record, and system of insight are really one synergistic system.
• Fundamentally, we provide useful technology that helps clients do their work more effectively and, in the process, do good locally.

Listening and then watching follow-up demonstrations, I started to feel a bit overwhelmed. Then I remembered a story once retold by William H. Baker, professor of management and communication at the Brigham Young University Marriott School of Business.

Many years ago, the federal government placed county agents throughout the country to help farmers learn to be more productive. One county agent in the South went to visit an old farmer in his area, but he found that convincing the farmer to change proved rather difficult.

He asked the farmer, “Wouldn’t you like to know how to get your cows to give more milk?”

“Nope,” the farmer replied.“Well, wouldn’t you like your pigs to have larger litters of baby pigs?”

Again, the farmer answered, “Nope.”

“Well, wouldn’t you like to learn how to get more corn per acre?”

The same answer was given as before: “Nope.”

Exasperated, the county agent asked, “Well, why not?”

The farmer replied simply, “I already knows more than I does.”

I can often relate with that farmer—I know more than I feel like I can actually accomplish. Yet we all want “more milk” and “more corn” for our organizations. We want to improve public asset management. We want to improve constituent engagement. We want to make better data-supported decisions. We want to improve our communities.

But, where to start? As Jack suggested, we live in a complicated world. The pace of technological change, community pressures, and constituent demands are rapidly accelerating. I’d like to suggest the best starting point is always to focus on the last item from my notes of Jack’s presentation: the importance of using technology and data to help individuals and organizations do their work more effectively and, in the process, do good locally.

In a recent article in CIO, Charles Arajuo argues that, “when it comes to big data, analytics, and AI the value does not come from collecting the data, or even from deriving some insight from it—value comes from just one thing: action.” 

GIS is the most effective way to help organize and manage the complexity of asset data. The Internet of Things and citizen engagement initiatives create immense reservoirs of data providing a real-time lens of what is happening. Analytics improve decision-making and planning, creating a system of insight. But, for value to be realized, organizations still need to identify and act on the problems and opportunities revealed by the data.

It also helps to break the approach down into bite-sized pieces. Here are my three suggestions:

Understand

Recognize the importance of being agile in your planning and processes. Then, prioritize what matters most for your organization. It’s critical that each department and individual understand and align with those priorities to maximize performance.

Plan

Determine where your organization resides when it comes to the system of engagement, system of record, and system of insight. Rather than try to do everything all at once, develop a realistic step-by-step plan to get from where you are today to where you want to be. Every organization should strive for continual improvement and identify and remove constraints that impede success. Cityworks and ArcGIS are tools to help you improve upon your process.

Act

Take that first step. After succeeding with step one, re-evaluate, adjust the plan as needed, and then take step two. Step by step, you’ll get to where you want to be. Along the way, always remember what matters most and refer back to key priorities to achieve your organizational goals and objectives.

We view GIS as a platform for sharing, collaborating, and solving problems comprehensively. As you drive transformation across your organization, Cityworks and ArcGIS fundamentally provide useful technology that helps your organization do its work and, in the process, do good locally. When you take action, you are transforming your public asset management to improve economic vitality and quality of life for your entire community.

Brian Haslam is president and CEO of Cityworks.

As leaders of public municipalities, we often compete with private entities on many levels. When providing services such as recreation centers, cemeteries, golf courses, and entertainment venues, there is a persistent need to stay close to market forces in order to ensure performance and value to our constituents.

Cities and towns do not typically compete with private entities when it comes to providing essential services such as public works, utilities, police, and fire. However, a lack of competition does not mean municipalities can forgo the evaluation of these services. In fact, quantifying value and performance can help an organization better serve its constituents, which in turn supports a strong resident base and business community.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, value is defined as “the importance, worth, or usefulness of something, to be beneficial. Take it one step further, and a value proposition becomes “an innovation, service, or feature intended to make a company or product attractive to its customers”—in this case, making a city more attractive to its residents, employees, and business community.

Sandy City administration is focused on increasing value throughout the city. In order to ensure wise and responsible stewardship of public dollars—whether for competitive or non-competitive services—the administration of Sandy City, Utah, created a value equation to help guide operational decisions. By referring to this equation, we can ensure that administrative decisions regarding resource allocation will deliver increased value.

Value = (Quality Services + Customer Satisfaction)
                                               Cost

The Equation Basics

A quick review of simple arithmetic reminds us that when an equation includes an equal sign, whatever changes you make to one side of the equation will also influence the other side of the equation.

For example, increasing the numerator on the righthand side of the equation (quality of service and customer satisfaction), also increases the value on the left-hand side of the equation.

Decreasing the denominator on the righthand side (cost) also results in a value increase on the opposite side of the equation.

So, what does this mean in the real world? By increasing the quality of services a city provides to residents—such as storm water drainage, street lighting, paved roads, beautiful parks, trails and open spaces, first responders, and many others—the value correspondingly increases.

Simultaneously, as we increase constituent engagement and satisfaction by creating positive experiences when working with city officials and operations staff, this increases our value to residents. The same logic applies to employee satisfaction. Lastly, Sandy City administration realizes that by decreasing costs through technology efficiencies, we also achieve increased value.

Sandy City is in the middle of a full-scale Cityworks implementation across all city departments. We recognize that technology alone cannot create value for a city. However, when the right technology is thoughtfully included as part of an organization-wide initiative to improve operational efficiencies, it can contribute to each of the variables in our value proposition.

Quality of Service

Using a single-point GIS system, like Cityworks, where all available data can be accessed, organized, and sorted accurately, is helping us create a more efficient way to obtain and analyze data. Having a more proficient system of engagement, record management, and data insight improves efficiencies in asset management, which will help us proactively plan for infrastructure replacement and repairs. These improvements in operational competencies increase the levels of service to our community.

Customer Satisfaction

When solutions are specifically designed to provide benefit to the end user, technology can help improve both employee and constituent satisfaction. With the help of training and careful deployment, technology solutions can give city employees access to real-time data while improving inter-departmental coordination and communication.

Using Cityworks mobile technology in the field improves our response times and helps streamline our business processes. Residents will be able to check status on projects occurring in the city. Developers and contractors can check status of their projects, make payments, and submit documents electronically, which saves time for both staff and the community as processes are streamlined. And, by using analytics to visualize concentrated problem areas, we can increase our ability to efficiently perform preventative maintenance and address issues proactively.

Costs

Reducing costs to increase value is clearly a priority for Sandy City and any private or public entity. By embracing technology like Cityworks, municipalities can utilize their limited funds efficiently in numerous ways, such as consolidation of software applications, reduction in onsite database hardware, and reduction of labor hours associated with providing services.

Value

We see increased value in every aspect of the Cityworks, including time savings, inventory management, real-time reports, preventive planning through data analytics, and streamlining data entry from a slow manual process to real-time point of service entry with the use of handheld PDAs in the field.

By strategically implementing innovative technologies, a smart city can adopt the operational efficiencies of the private sector while also improving quality of life for residents. Sandy City strives to provide value through a customer-centered approach to quality service and cost management. When every department—every employee—is part of the value equation, the whole community benefits.

Matthew Huish is chief administrative officer at Sandy City in Utah.

Over the course of the last decade, municipal governments have increasingly turned to IT consolidation as a means of reducing costs while also improving service delivery. For many organizations, IT consolidation means the re-centralization of IT services into one single department. Other organizations have taken it a step further by also consolidating software applications so all departments are sharing the same systems for common business practices.

The City of Weatherford, TX, used Cityworks as a platform to bring several business processes under one umbrella. Austin Nichols, business analyst at the City of Weatherford Information Technology Department, shares how the city teamed up across departments to improve operations, increase efficiencies, and reduce costs.

Establishing the System of Record

One of the first benefits we saw from our software consolidation was the elimination of data silos across the organization. Part of that is due to the GIS-centric nature of Cityworks. All of our assets are in one authoritative data repository, regardless of the department that manages them.

The Water and Wastewater and Electric Utility Departments implemented Cityworks first in 2013. Then, the Transportation and Public Works Department went live in 2015. Although Transportation and Public Works wasn’t necessarily unhappy with their existing work management system, they were willing to migrate onto a common platform. Management recognized that, by sharing information with other departments, they’d achieve greater collaboration and cost savings in the long run.

We did have to make changes in our business processes to ensure our system of record contained quality data. For example, we had to get out of the habit of deleting. Previously, if an electric line was being replaced, we’d delete the old line and draw in the new one. Now, we have a lifecycle field that allows us to retire assets and retain the work history associated with them. A query lets us display only active assets on the map for day-to-day work.

Other departments, like our Parks and Recreation Department, had to build their system of record from scratch. Before they went live with Cityworks, the Parks Department collected every sprinkler head, trash can, swing, slide, pavilion—you name it. It took about six months to complete, but now they have a robust geospatial infrastructure that will support their operations for years to come.

Once our asset management system was in place, the next logical area of improvement was in our warehouse. The addition of Cityworks Storeroom expanded the capacity of our centralized system of record, and it opened up communication between field crews and warehouse staff. Once materials are added to work orders, the warehouse staff can see exactly what’s needed, pull the necessary items, and let the field crews know when everything is ready.

As a result of the improved communication, the City of Weatherford saw significant cost savings in just a short period of time. Prior to the Storeroom implementation, our inventory audit saw a variance of negative $66,706—or 0.02 percent. In the first fiscal year after the implementation, the warehouse inventory audit saw a variance of positive $3067—or 0.00089 percent.

System of Engagement

You can’t have an effective system of record unless management, field crews, and the public have user-friendly points of access. In 2013, the same year we first implemented Cityworks AMS and Storeroom, our field crews and warehouse staff went live with Freeance Mobile for Cityworks on iPads.

More recently, we also implemented a WinCan-Cityworks integration that has dramatically improved time savings for our Water and Wastewater Department. Like many other cities, our camera inspection crews are required to inspect a certain number of lines each month.

With our previous system, the CCTV crew member would have to come back to the office at the end of the day and spend an hour adding inspection data manually into Cityworks. If that crew member is working an eight-hour day, he’s losing more than 12 percent of his day on data entry alone.

The WinCan-Cityworks integration eliminated that wasted time. Now, when a CCTV inspection is complete, the data and media files collected by WinCan automatically populate the appropriate Cityworks inspection fields. It’s also much easier to pull information about any given pipe segment. The manager can simply search for an address or location and have the inspection data immediately accessible.

We also believe in the power of enlisting the public to help us identify and report issues in their community. The City of Weatherford uses CitySourced to power our myWeatherford app. Prior to the implementation, we had too many different types of services requests coming in, and we didn’t have an efficient method for responding to the requests. myWeatherford gives the public one centralized tool for looking up information, reporting issues, and staying informed on open requests. And, like all our tools, it integrates seamlessly with Cityworks and ArcGIS.

Over the course of four years, we received and completed 2,000 service requests through myWeatherford.

By limiting the number of walk-ins, phone calls, and emails city staff had to process manually, we realized a cost savings of more than $75,000.

System of Insights

Once our systems of record and engagement were in place, we could begin building our system of insight. We immediately saw the benefits of capturing the true cost of work. Now, management can evaluate the cost of their operations and make accurate business cases for budgetary needs.

We also look for opportunities to integrate third-party analytics tools into our platform. For example, PAVER calculates a condition score for each of our streets based on the work history we’ve captured in Cityworks. By placing these condition scores on a citywide map, we can help both the streets team and city council prioritize capital improvement projects.

As our departments continue to collect more data, we will look for other opportunities to implement other analytics solutions to support improved decision-making across the entire organization. The goal for us, ultimately, is to give each of our stakeholders a single point of access for the information they need. By consciously choosing software solutions that are easier to manage and control, we can achieve a great return on investment for our organization and our community as a whole.

Austin Nichols is a business analyst at the City of Weatherford Information Technology Department.

Making long-term plans while also managing day-to-day operations is hard. There’s always something competing for your time.

By collecting relevant data along the way, you can help make strategic planning easier. The City of Topeka is an expert at employing this approach.

City officials recently shared how they collect and assess data from city systems such as SeeClickFix, Cityworks, and ArcGIS to make long-term public service strategies and implementation plans. Here’s how the city handles the work now while building strategic plans for the future.

Read: Getting the Most Bang for the Buck with Public Services in Topeka, KS (via SeeClickFix).

When we talk about Cityworks AMS or Cityworks PLL, we are referring to the core GIS-centric platforms that support your asset management and community development operations. Our goal is to support critical business workflows at every level of your organization and across multiple departments. However, we also recognize that your field inspector doesn’t need access to the same tools your warehouse manager uses.

Over the past two years, we’ve focused on developing specialized applications that support unique user experiences and defined workflows. Here’s a sampling of the latest Cityworks applications.

Mobile Native Apps 7

The Cityworks native apps, which are available on both iOS and Android devices, cache data locally on the device. This allows field crews to conduct inspections, investigate service requests, perform maintenance, and complete PLL tasks even out of network range. The latest version of the apps includes seamless integrations with Esri apps, expanding your out-of-the-box functionality. For example, field users can easily access Collector for ArcGIS from the Cityworks native mobile apps to capture or edit an asset in the GIS.

Respond 1.6

Take the Cityworks work management functionality into the field. With the help of a continuous network connection, Respond helps field crews maintain continuous, real-time updates from their tablets. Respond also gives users the power to create and manage aspects of Cityworks from a remote location. The latest version includes advanced search options and the ability to capture digital signatures on inspections and PLL tasks. 

Operational Insights 1.3

Operational Insights provides organizations with a means to identify and assess high-risk assets and to establish maintenance strategies to increase their lifespan. Although the application requires strategic planning on the part of the organization, the benefits of the ongoing risk assessment and prioritization are clear. With its tie to Insights for ArcGIS, the calculated results can be displayed on a map so capital improvement funding can be prioritized and applied more accurately.

Performance Budgeting 1.3

When you track work progress against desired or anticipated levels, you can better promote crew accountability and efficiency, improve data quality and material tracking, and provide administrators with reliable indicators for infrastructure management. Performance Budgeting supports activity-based budgeting reconciliation, year-to-date tracking, and annual and daily budget projections. The latest version of the app includes new preferences to support dynamic cost codes, as well as setting options like workday hours and budget ranges.

Public Access 4.1

Cityworks PLL continues to expand functionality to help communities streamline their permitting and code enforcement processes. The Public Access application allows PLL users to create customizable landing pages that enable residents and contractors to request and schedule inspections with the help of an easy-to-use calendar interface. Once an inspection is scheduled, the user receives a confirmation of the calendar appointment.

Storeroom 1.2

Our warehouse management application is designed to track materials and transactions in a secure environment. As part of a holistic public asset management platform, Storeroom can help organizations reduce material costs, improve inventory levels, and better inform budgetary needs. Storeroom supports barcode scanning and other methods of automated warehouse data collection. Storeroom is also fully integrated with Cityworks Analytics to enable more detailed, visual reports.

Style 1.1

This application allows Cityworks administrators to customize other Cityworks apps. With the help of Style, Cityworks admins can modify what each group or end user sees so it pertains to their operational needs. Style was released in 2018, so be sure to visit MyCityworks to explore everything it can do. 

Workload 1.1

For supervisors who manage field crews and inspectors, juggling employee schedules can be a daunting task. Workload gives supervisors a simple yet powerful interface for reviewing, assigning, and modifying work activities. The application includes a dynamic map interface and allows managers to interact with PLL cases as well as AMS work orders and inspections.

Analytics 3.0

Although it’s not an application, Analytics 3.0 deserves its own special mention. Cityworks Analytics uses Esri’s Insights for ArcGIS® to analyze Cityworks data models created for work orders, service requests, inspections, Storeroom, and PLL. Together, Cityworks Analytics and Insights for ArcGIS can help you easily visualize Cityworks data with simple yet powerful data visualizations, from real-time maps to dynamic charts and graphs.

As natural disasters increase in quantity and severity, municipalities find themselves grappling with an increased need for FEMA reimbursements to support emergency response and recovery.

If you have been through an emergency operations center (EOC) activation, then you understand that the quality of documentation during an event can make or break a community’s recovery phase. With the help of Cityworks and ArcGIS, your organization can streamline emergency event operations and improve documentation to meet FEMA reporting requirements.

Make the Workflows Familiar

One key preparation step is to embed your emergency workflows into your daily operations. Are your staff comfortable generating service requests, work orders, or inspections? Are they familiar with the process of capturing comments, costs, pictures, and attachments? Even if the answer to these questions is yes, make sure to incorporate documentation collection as part of your annual emergency exercises so everyone understands his or her role and the importance of the documentation unit.

Capture Data During the Event

Capturing associated event costs is crucial to requesting FEMA’s Public Assistance (PA) grants. While some organizations have internal costs for equipment, FEMA reimburses according to its own fee schedule at the time of the event. The Cityworks local government templates database, available online at MyCityworks, includes the latest FEMA schedule rates. By using accurate FEMA rates during an event activation, you can rest assured your organization will be in compliance.

During an event, having accurate information on available resources is critical to planning the next shift and deploying the correct staff. One way to keep everyone informed is to use the Notes widget to communicate the current shift employees and crews for each branch. Each work activity saved in Cityworks becomes the substantial documentation supporting FEMA’s ICS 214 form, also known as the Activity Log.

Some organizations choose to label event-related work orders using the status field. Others use a separate template that reflects their emergency operations plan. Regardless of your method, one effective way to bundle all associated work activities and costs is to tag them with a project. Project Manager will then allow you to see the expended costs, which can be used to calculate the burn rate.

Visualizing Event Data

The data you collect during an event can have incredible value beyond FEMA reporting. With the help of Cityworks and ArcGIS, you can reinvest it to inform both your operations and your community. For example, event layers can help keep field staff informed while Cityworks eURLs can extend your information into Esri tools such as Operations Dashboard and WebApp Builder.

The screenshot shown here demonstrates how an Operations Dashboard can be incorporated into a Cityworks Inbox or displayed outside of Cityworks in the EOC or field post—enabling all staff to remain informed of operations and resource requests. Cityworks eURLs can also be published to publicly accessible web maps that display the status of reported calls, areas under notice, or closed roadways.

All municipalities, regardless of their emergency events risk, can benefit from implementing the workflows and data elements to support effective FEMA reporting. Ultimately, this pre-planning will help your organization build a more resilient, safe, and sustainable community.

Dinorah Sanchez is an asset management subject matter expert at Cityworks. She can be reached at info@cityworks.com.

The City of South Bend, Indiana, manages 700 miles of sanitary and storm sewers and 10,000 catch basins, inlets, and drains through its Department of Public Works Office of Sewers. For years, the department relied on multiple siloed software solutions to maintain these assets, navigating congested and outdated processes that hampered productivity.

To more effectively maintain these assets and unclog the department’s workflow, South Bend reached out to Woolpert to conduct a pilot of the Cityworks Asset Management System (AMS). The Office of Sewers is now live with an on-premises implementation of Cityworks AMS, and field crews use Cityworks Respond and mobile native apps on iPads.

The Office of Sewers can now easily schedule and coordinate crews, communicate work assignments, track materials and labor, and mitigate risks by analyzing problem spots and proactively managing inventory.

“The biggest successes in the implementation have been a reduction in paperwork, especially for field crews, and increased communication between crews and supervisors,” said Jeff Weaver, asset and capital improvement manager for South Bend. “Cityworks provides the ability to see work geographically, and thus coordinate our resources more efficiently.”

Weaver said prior to the Cityworks implementation, documenting sewer backups—which are heavily regulated and closely monitored due to the potential ecological impact—led to paperwork snarls.

“The documentation process included passing information back and forth between 311, sewers, sewer dispatch, sewer insurance, wastewater, and even engineering,” Weaver said. “All records of communication had to be written out and copies sent to four different organizations. The sewer backup workflow in Cityworks allows the crews to keep all information in one location, eliminate redundant information, take photos and videos, and track and monitor all actions. It’s now a completely paperless process that’s available to all departments.”

Some of the immediate benefits of the implementation include:

• Digitizing service requests and updates to field crews to eliminate all paper processes.
• Tracking and dispatching jobs in the same geographic area to increase productivity and reduce travel.
• Streamlining the process of noticing or researching problems, not only by the location but also by the type or age of the pipe.

South Bend is now digitally able to pinpoint potential “hot spots” through simple queries of the system instead of searching through piles of paperwork that detail past problems.

The streamlined workflows have also freed up more time for thoughtful planning. Instead of supervisors driving around the city to approve completed jobs, they now receive an emailed link to a digitized work order in the system with attached before and after photos—saving them valuable time and effort.

This pilot project in South Bend benefited from lessons learned from prior implementations. Since 2016, Augusta, Georgia, and Carmel, Indiana, have partnered with Woolpert for the implementation of their Cityworks AMS programs, both of which started with their utility departments. Both communities found success by starting in a single department and gradually expanding to other departments.

Tips for Success

• Designate an internal champion to anticipate and address potential roadblocks as well as work through technology issues with IT and employees to help them understand how to deal with real-world issues as they arise.
• Involve all the staff in training and provide whatever support they need. Power users will benefit from extra training. Some users who never used a smartphone will need more time.
• Provide different tools for different tasks. For example, supervisors may not want iPads.
• Make sure everyone understands the terminology and knows how to use the app. Backup staff need to be as well-trained as the primary user.
• Plan for a phased implementation: Start with maintenance, then construction, and finally restoration.
• Communicate! Cityworks vastly improves knowledge sharing, but it does not replace face-to-face communication or phone calls

In South Bend, Woolpert has conducted on-site demonstrations for multiple departments to examine the Office of Sewers’ success and how its improved asset management system can be applied to other departmental needs. South Bend Chief Technology Officer of Innovation and Technology Dan O’Connor said the meetings were well received.

“Department members learned more about how to use the system as an enterprise solution inclusive of multiple departments,” O’Connor said.

“We will take a phase-it-in approach, making sure we can maintain and build upon what we have as we expand. By working with IT and discussing the needs of each department, we can collaboratively prioritize and plan which departments will be added to Cityworks next.”

Steve Schwabe is a project manager at Woolpert. Contact him at steve.schwabe@woolpert.com.

So, you’ve successfully implemented your new permitting system. The software is live, organizational workflows and calculations have been added, and office and field staff are fully on board. But what do you do with historical case data still sitting in your legacy system?

Migrating legacy cases from an outdated, unsupported system can seem like an overwhelming project. In reality, it’s worth the time and cost to migrate legacy data. Properly executed data migration eliminates the need to continue hosting, training, and using the old system for retrieval of information. It can also provide a tool for creating “in-process” cases within Cityworks in a way that reduces data entry time. For organizations migrating from a platform that’s not spatially aware, this process can also take advantage of the Cityworks GIS backbone for old cases.

A longtime user of Cityworks AMS, the City of O’Fallon, Illinois, decided to expand to Cityworks PLL in 2017. The community development department needed a way for the public to electronically submit applications, schedule inspections, and make integrated online payments. They also needed a good PLL system that could support geospatial data and maps.

Early in the process, the City of O’Fallon reached out to Burns and McDonnell, the city’s professional services provider. Their expectations and feedback helped guide the city’s development goals for data conversion.

From PLL implementation to data migration, the entire project took 13 months and involved 10 internal staff and three Burns and McDonnell consultants. By the end of the project, the team had migrated more than 46,000 legacy cases with searchable tags. Remarkably, the team also moved 5,366 active or “inflight data” cases, giving field inspectors immediate access to update cases in Cityworks while on site.

Here’s the secret to O’Fallon’s success.

Prioritize

At the onset, O’Fallon separated project components into must-haves, want-to-haves, and would-be-nice-to-haves. The motto for managing success was, “Build for the must-haves, budget for the want-to-haves.” Although the city wanted to deploy Public Access, for example, they decided to save it for a separate project so the team could focus first on the PLL implementation and data migration.

Test Early and Frequently

Before jumping into the full implementation, O’Fallon initiated a pilot project in a separate test environment to explore the workflow process. The team identified a few representative case types and designed workflow process steps for them.

This pilot stage allowed key managers and technical staff to get familiar with the complexities of the new system. It also allowed us to vet the proposed workflow and case system without committing the entirety of the budget to a new process. Once the full implementation was underway, technical implementers sought and applied regular feedback from managers, a sampling of end users, and other stakeholders.

Document and Streamline Workflows

Before creating a single case, O’Fallon created a fully annotated list for each case type that outlines all tasks, task results, and branching task results. A spreadsheet in a SharePoint shared work environment worked well for this purpose. The city found that result sets and tasks grew quickly during case template build-outs, so the team also used this opportunity to streamline workflows as much as possible.

Communicate

While project teams worked independently, they also met collectively for weekly or bi-weekly conference calls. These collaborative meetings became more frequent as task responsibilities shifted from whiteboard plans to fully-articulated processes. The teams used a mix of SharePoint, a Microsoft Teams site, and shared Office documents to collaborate with and inform key stakeholders.

Expect the Unexpected

Early in the build-out phase, the team discovered that the legacy permitting system didn’t have clear distinctions in its table structure to determine case status. The fields and tables varied depending on the record type. This posed a significant obstacle to data conversion, since the team had intended to separate these record types into “In Process” and “Legacy Historical” groups.

IT Manager Dan Gentry brought his expertise to the fore. Working with key community development staff, Gentry used Microsoft Power BI to create a schematic to help Burns and McDonnell identify and recode each record’s status. He was also able to provide real-time reports on legacy records with additional data fields that needed migration.

To import legacy data, the team used Cityworks’ custom tables in PLL for Case Types. By now, the project teams had unscrambled the old system’s data into four main groups: General Permits, Licenses, Code Enforcement, and Crime Free Housing permits. Each of these groups was further separated into historical archive case types and “in process” cases. The team then created eight custom PLL tables, each with approximately twenty fields, to hold imported data from the legacy system.

Get Creative

Another hurdle involved data search for the end user. Although PLL custom tables were the best solution for capturing key data from the legacy system, the table elements were not searchable from the user interface.

After the legacy data was migrated to PLL, the team realized an updated SQL query could be used to populate the Tag field in PLL case tables with formatted values such as permit ID, permit type, date created, expiration, and more. With tag parameters set, a user can easily search among 46,000 legacy records for all business licenses that expired on April 1, 2015, for example. Using a combination of Tag elements, a user can also return all legacy case types that were home occupancy permits created in the past 12 months.

Close the Deal

Regardless of the innovation inspired and milestones achieved, a project needs to be completed before it can be judged a success. Projects that influence, drive, and enable (or disable) an employee’s ability to complete her work at some point bring anxiety and fear of failure.

To help ensure complete buy-in and establish Cityworks as the definitive source of record for converted “in process” cases, O’Fallon took inspiration from Cortez and decided to “burn the ships!” Team leadership announced that, at go-live, the old platform would be converted to a read-only platform.

While the short-term effect was to increase anxiety, the subsequent Cityworks training was well-received. Staff readily applied their knowledge to help anticipate and plan for potential workflow issues that might be experienced at go-live. On the day of go-live, city employees were committed to making the new system work with the migrated data, and the results have been beyond expectation.

Chad Quinn is a GIS coordinator at the City of O’Fallon.

Water distribution organizations are tasked with more than just the reliable delivery of clean, safe water. They also need to manage and care for the infrastructure itself. Whether you’re rehabilitating, replacing, or simply fixing your assets, extending their lifespan in the safest, most cost-effective way possible is a valuable goal.

Age-based replacement, although it can be tangibly analyzed, isn’t always the most effective method for prioritizing asset replacement. While age can often be an indicator of condition and relative remaining lifespan, it can also create false positives. An 80-year-old pipe, free of any maintenance history, may be very sound now and for years to come. Meanwhile, a five-year-old pipe in the same system might require constant maintenance. Which pipe would you choose to rehab or replace first?

Other variables need to be considered together, such as material and soil type. For example, a 2018 study found that cast iron pipes located in highly corrosive soils fail at a rate 20 percent higher than cast iron pipes in low corrosion soils.

These anomalies can make prioritization seem like an art or an educated guess rather than something that can be tangibly measured. When you’re looking at an entire system worth of data, it can be a daunting task to effectively prioritize capital improvement projects. However, there is a way to take control of all these variables and apply a standardized methodology to your decision-making.

Here’s what you need:

• Geographic information system (GIS)
• Computerized maintenance management system (CMMS)
• Institutional knowledge (gut feel)
• A model for calculating risk

Geographic Information System (GIS)

Over the course of the last few decades, the utility industry has increasingly invested in GIS as the asset repository. A robust geodatabase allows organizations to create an authoritative record of the locations and attributes of all its assets. This geospatial infrastructure lays the groundwork for location intelligence, and it can also tie into other business tools like modeling, billing, meter, SCADA, and CMMS software solutions.

Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS)

A CMMS can help you track any issues, complaints, and work being done throughout your utility network. A GIS-centric CMMS can do this without redundant asset data or syncing tools by using your geodatabase as your authoritative asset repository. When it comes to tracking information on water quality issues, for example, any associated work orders, labor, costs, and materials can be associated with the asset in the GIS. A good CMMS should also help you schedule preventative maintenance and conduct condition assessments. The more data you collect, the more insights you’ll gain into your operations and the health of your infrastructure.

Institutional Knowledge (Gut Feel)

It’s also important to capture existing institutional knowledge. None of today’s computerized systems go back to the early- or mid-1900s. As time has passed, so too have historical events and their history. Formalizing this undocumented knowledge can help with some of your more tangible analysis, as well.

Calculating Risk

Using an application like Cityworks Operational Insights, all of these inputs can be aggregated into manageable values and used to help inform your decisions. Operational Insights can be configured to use your GIS and CMMS data to calculate the Probability of Failure (PoF), Consequence of Failure (CoF) and Business Risk Exposure (BRE) values.

The PoF represents how likely it is that an asset will fail. As I mentioned before, this value isn’t totally dependent on age. Variables like age, condition, material, diameter, and break history can all contribute to this calculation.

CoF associates a value with the results of any given asset failure. These results would include not just the financial expense of direct repair and collateral damage, but also any social, environmental, or legal costs. A break in a large water main that serves tens of thousands of people downstream would have a much different CoF value than a small main that serves a few homes in a cul-de-sac.

BRE is the product of these two values (CoF * PoF = BRE), and it represents the overall risk of the asset. BRE identifies those assets that are not only more likely to fail but also carry a higher consequence of failure. The weight of these data points could be adjusted based on locale or the history of the network, allowing you to use data to account for and further explore institutional knowledge. For example, if a veteran employee who’s been with the organization for 40 years knows that the mains in the southeast end of town tend to act up more than others, you can dig into what may be causing that and weigh those inputs appropriately.

You can take into account the maintenance history on the asset. This will tell you if you are over-maintaining or under-maintaining your assets from both a preventative and reactive perspective. If the data shows that you’re constantly doing point repairs on high BRE assets, it might be time to prioritize those assets for rehab or replacement in the capital budget.

Most importantly, since all of these assets are housed in the GIS, they can be spatially viewed and analyzed to discover patterns. They can also be viewed as a heat map to easily see hot and cold spots in your network. Additional spot inspections to ground-truth some of the analytical results can be performed to assure accuracy.

With the help of these four tools, you can begin to develop a risk-based prioritization approach to managing your assets—enabling your organization to work smarter to create a safer and more reliable water network for your community.

By Josh Stroessner, Cityworks business development manager.