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MEDIA
User Spotlight: Oklahoma City, OK
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 At 622 square miles, Oklahoma City is among the largest cities by land area in the United States. Home to more than half a million residents, the city boasts some of the best water quality in the nation and tops in services supplied to customers. Helping support these claims, the city has long recognized the importance of state-of-the-art technologies such as Geographic Information and Computerized Maintenance Management Systems. Oklahoma City leads the way, combining both GIS and CMMS in Cityworks.Situation In 1995, the Oklahoma City's Water and Wastewater Utilities group developed an in-house system to manage citizen requests and subsequent work orders. Recognizing it as a temporary solution, the homemade system soon met its match, bogging down under the load of hundreds of thousands of work orders. Moreover, data was difficult to extract and staff eventually discovered they were actually losing important information. After attempting several work arounds, including double entry into another database system, the utilities group sought the help of city's Information Technology team to find a commercial, off-the-shelf system to meet their needs. Vision Randy Harris, Dispatch Supervisor envisioned an easy-to-use system that would be available from a commercial supplier such that future upgrades and technical support would be available when he needed help. Equally important was having a work order management system that functioned together with a GIS, taking advantage of the investment made in Public Works infrastructure GIS data. "Over the years, we looked at several solutions," reported Randy. "Seeing the benefits of a GIS-based system really turned me around." Randy and his staff had seen Cityworks at neighboring Edmond Oklahoma and, being somewhat familiar with ESRI's ArcView for general location and reference, he was convinced a GIS enabled system would provide countless benefits. Being able to see what work was going on where became a high priority. Solution The city's Information Technology Department issued a Request for Information for a Computerized Maintenance Management System and received responses from several vendors. Following a head-to-head competition, the City selected Cityworks. Azteca Systems was awarded a contract to implement Cityworks for the Water and Wastewater Utilities department with the intention of ultimately deploying Cityworks throughout the remainder of the City in the future. Stan Reichert and Stacey Bone, IT Project Managers for the City of Oklahoma City, worked with Azteca to implement this solution. After this fast, very successful implementation of Cityworks and with support from the City Manager, the City of Oklahoma City will deploy Cityworks throughout the rest of the City. GIS and IT had long recognized the benefits GIS provides for data visualization, yet focused on Cityworks' ability to utilize the core infrastructure GeoDatabase as the asset inventory – a single source data repository shared across the enterprise. Enabling the Water and Wastewater Utilities staff with GIS-based maintenance management tools specifically designed around their needs made perfect sense. In addition, the open architecture of the Cityworks database made it easy for them to interface with existing business systems. As a part of the contract, Azteca developed an interface to the city's Utility Billing system and an automated daily download for the customer information system. Now, Cityworks is able to capture water meter problems identified in the customer information system and create work orders to remedy these issues. Result Today, Cityworks is used by Water and Wastewater Utilities staff to collect and react to citizen service requests, dispatch reactive and preventative work orders to field operations crews, and track related infrastructure assets throughout the service area. In addition, the Cityworks database is tapped by the city's map-based web service to display active work activities together with other GIS data. Dispatchers are able to see work related activities and how they might correspond to surrounding incidents and infrastructure. Reporting is easy and effective, being able to retrieve regular, periodic and ad hoc reports using Cityworks' inherent reporting engine and Crystal Reports. The city has realized better workflow as a result. Service representatives now investigate problems first and either resolve the customer's issue or create a subsequent work order to remedy the situation. Service representatives communicate with dispatchers via radio, but look to implementing a wireless solution in the future. Statistics
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