From Forms to Screens:
City of Lethbridge Revamps Asset
Management with Cityworks
Keeping tabs on the value and condition of your possessions
(houses, cars, computers, etc.) and making decisions about what needs
to be fixed and what needs to be replaced can be a tough juggling
act. But imagine for a moment that you’re in charge of ensuring that
thousands of assets worth millions of dollars are properly managed. This
is what Joel Sanchez does for a living.
Mr. Sanchez is an asset manager who’s leading an effort at the City of
Lethbridge called the Community Asset Management Program (CAMP).
His job is to improve the way thousands of municipal infrastructure
assets are managed, including roads, fire hydrants, sewer grates and
water mains. Just so you can appreciate the scale of the responsibility, in
Lethbridge, there are over 600 kms of water mains alone.
How do you effectively manage so many disparate assets using a
system that’s accessed by different departments? In 2011, Mr. Sanchez
and his team had to tackle this big question as part of the City’s asset
management program reboot. They determined that location was the
missing ingredient.
“Having municipal assets that are tied to a location is important,”
said Mr. Sanchez. “You can quickly find assets on a map to locate
information or issues in the field. That’s why we felt that implementing
a GIS-centric asset management solution would be the most effective
platform.”
Specifically, the City of Lethbridge identified the need for a GIS-based
asset management solution to collect service requests, generate work
orders, track maintenance costs and create reports to more effectively
manage the City’s linear assets (e.g, fire hydrants) and non-linear assets
(e.g, roads). The implementation of a new system would help the City
overcome several challenges. This included a paper-based process to
manage routine maintenance activity and asset records.
“Even though a change to an asset might have been captured,
it could take weeks before it was actually filed in a binder, so asset
information wasn’t always up to date,” said Mr. Sanchez. “Plus, there was
double data entry. Field crews were filling out forms and then bringing
them to the office for the GIS department to re-enter into maps.”
The drawbacks of the paper-based system extended to emergency
situations, too. For example, if a water main break occurred, a foreman
would often need to retrieve asset records before visiting the incident
location.
Led by Mr. Sanchez, the CAMP team engaged several departments
as part of the requirements gathering process. Integration with the
City’s corporate financial system, JD Edwards, was deemed the system’s
most critical requirement. After a formal RFP process, the City selected
Cityworks as the platform for its asset management system. Developed
by Azteca Systems, Cityworks offered a combination of a GIS-centric
platform built on ArcGIS, system interoperability and a robust asset data
management repository that was well-suited for the City’s requirements.
In truth, its open architecture and compatibility with JD Edwards and
other systems (ArcGIS and PeopleSoft) made Cityworks the only proven
solution that covered all of the bases on the City’s ‘must-have’ list. Plus,
the successful adoption of Cityworks by two cities in neighbouring BC
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ArcNorthNews
with similar requirements, the City of Kamloops and the City of Prince
George, reinforced the system’s reputation as a tried-and-tested asset
management platform.
With Cityworks, Lethbridge had a prime opportunity to extend its
previous investment in ArcGIS, a big bonus for a city that saw a bright
future for GIS in its organization.
“We’re an existing ArcGIS customer and Cityworks works very well
with ArcGIS, so Cityworks appealed to us,” said Mr. Sanchez.
With Cityworks, the City can seamlessly integrate features from its
existing geodatabase—such as water, wastewater, storm water, streets,
parks and facilities—into its new digitized asset repository. This eliminated
the cost of duplicating data and the need to synchronize with other
systems, a tricky if not risky process. To further increase their investment
and broaden use of GIS in other departments, the City signed an
Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) with Esri Canada, increasing their
access to software licenses and maintenance at a lower cost-per-user
compared to purchasing individual licenses.
The City adopted a phased approach to roll out its new infrastructure
asset management platform, implementing Cityworks for its Water Public
Operations in September 2014. Thirty-eight service request templates
and 76 work order templates were configured to help Water Operation
crews streamline the inspection, condition assessment and maintenance
activities for assets such as water mains, hydrants, pumps and detention
ponds. Binders with paper records were replaced by laptops and tablets
with Cityworks, giving crews instant access to work orders and historical
and up-to-date data about water-related assets on a map-based
interface. Cityworks connects field crews and office staff with real-time
updates during routine maintenance and emergency repair work
performed on the City’s Water Operations assets.
Cityworks keeps City of Lethbridge asset management field crews connected with realtime updates during routine maintenance and emergency repair work.
“Giving crews in the field real-time access to the most up-to-date
information that’s tied to an asset’s location saves us considerable time,”
said Mr. Sanchez. “For example, if a water main breaks, a service request
is created by an administrative assistant using Cityworks and a foreman
in the field receives it on his iPhone or iPad. Right away he can see the
service request and create a work order and then access all relevant asset
records, like drawings or work history, without having to go the office and
searching through binders.”
After investigating a broken water main scenario, a foreman then uses
Cityworks to delegate the work order to an excavation crew, who in turn
uses the system to notify the maintenance group when the water main
has been exposed. Once maintenance crews have repaired the water
main, the work order is transferred to another crew for quality-control
testing. When repair work is wrapped up, the project budget and other
pertinent information is seamlessly transferred back to the City’s financial
system. In effect, Cityworks has become a hub of information and activity
reporting connecting Water Operations crews and office staff that’s
helping them communicate and share information more effectively.
Cityworks also enables the City to forecast, plan and communicate
water-related asset maintenance to City Council in new ways. For
example, after a disproportionate number of sewer back-ups began
occurring in an older area of the City, GIS staff used out-of-the-box
tools in Cityworks to generate a heat map visualizing locations of citizen
complaints and repair work. The heat map was included in a successful
request submitted to City Council to complete extensive repair work to fix
the problem.
In the future, Mr. Sanchez plans to use Cityworks to perform
more analysis of this kind to help change the City’s approach to asset
management.
“In the past, the breakdown of our asset management efforts has
been 65% corrective maintenance versus 35% preventive maintenance,”
said Mr. Sanchez. “We would like to flip the two so we can become more
proactive in our approach. Cityworks will be a big part of that. It’s going
to help us demonstrate how we have become much more focused on
preventive maintenance.”
The addition of two GIS/asset management technicians by early
summer will help make this plan a reality. Initially, these GIS professionals
will generate reports, maps and heat maps to assist the Water Operations
department. Over time, they’ll work with the Transportation, Waste, and
Parks and Recreation departments to improve collaboration and make
better use of the information that’s being captured in the system. Future
plans for Cityworks include consolidating public and private excavation
permits to encourage better planning and the development of a mobile
app for citizens to submit service requests.
Heat maps that visualize locations of citizen complaints and repair work are referenced
during presentations for asset management funding requests.
“Having municipal assets that are tied to a location is important. You can quickly find assets
on a map to locate information or issues in the field. That’s why we believed implementing a
GIS-centric asset management solution would be the most effective platform.”
Joel Sanchez
Asset Manager, Community Asset Management Program
Infrastructure Services, City of Lethbridge
Watch this
Web seminar
to get started.
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SPRING 2015 |
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