Water, wastewater and stormwater utilities need to plan for both short and long term activities and strike the appropriate balance between their present and future needs.
Short Term Planning
Short term planning is focused more on daily and weekly utility operations and includes a mix of proactive and re-active work that is normally carried out and managed through workorders. Proactive activities include scheduled of routine maintenance, while re-active activities include responding to customer service requests, turn on and turn offs, meter reading and emergency response. ArcGIS enables utilities to more efficiently plan for the short term in many ways. For example, ArcGIS can be used to generate routes for your field crews to ensure they accomplish their tasks while minimizing cost and time. You can also identify locations where additional, proactive maintenance activities may be required using information about recent customer complaints, leaks, maintenance records, and asset conditions.
Long Term Planning
For water utilities, long term planning is typically done through a Capital Improvement Plan (CIP). Capital planning is a data intensive activity for many water utilities and requires the fusion of many pieces of data including asset condition and performance, criticality analysis, customer complaints, water quality information as well as the long term plans from other governmental agencies such as land use plans and future paving plans. ArcGIS enables water utilities to analyze and understand many sources of data to make better long term plans and to be sure that capital project funding is been spent in the right places.
At modern water utilities, a Capital Improvement Plan is no longer a static document, instead it is a continuous process that can take into account shifting priorities and needs and is able to take advantage of the rapid availability of grant funding when it become available. ArcGIS helps water utilities leverage the strengths of geo-design to rapidly cost out asset rehabilitation and replacement as well as estimating the cost of main extensions.
Download the ArcGIS Water Distribution Capital Planning template to understand how to analyze data to support asset management and capital planning as use the ArcGIS CIP Tools to rapidly estimate costs for capital projects.