Woodland is located approximately 20 miles northwest of Sacramento. Within the past decade, Woodland has grown to approximately 55,500 residents, with many additions to the community including numerous subdivisions and shopping centers.
Woodland utilizes Cityworks Anywhere, which is accessible in real time to Public Works staff in the office or field. Field staff can create, edit, and complete work orders and service requests anytime, including after hours for emergency callouts. Labor, materials, and equipment are added to work orders at the time work is completed which adds efficiency and accuracy to data entry.
Currently the City’s GIS stores assets for the following groups: Sewer, Storm, Water, Electrical, Trees, Signs and Markings, Parks, and Wastewater Treatment Plant. Users in these groups attach all work orders to a GIS asset in Cityworks. Service requests and unattached work orders are geocoded.
Woodland’s CCTV inspection program is heavily reliant on Cityworks and GIS. ITPipes integration with Cityworks and GIS has recently been implemented, reducing the risk of human error during inspections by using data validation for attribute and observation collection. Data collected during the inspection is consolidated into a single database with some of the inspection values being pushed back into GIS.
The majority of the Public Work Department’s Dell laptops used in the field are semi-rugged (E6400 ATG Series) while a handful are fully ruggedized (XFR Series). All laptops have an internal mobile broadband card. VPN connectivity is managed via Netmotion (netmotionwireless.com), which protects data traffic and wireless devices with the industry’s highest encryption standards. Netmotion automatically maintains connection and application sessions, optimizes connection and quality of service (QoS) to improve network speed and prioritize critical applications, and creates a centralized view of wireless deployments with comprehensive reporting. GIS data is stored in an Esri ArcSDE geodatabase, which is running on Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
Cityworks is used from two separate terminal servers. One terminal server runs Cityworks Anywhere and is used by most of the Public Works staff. A second terminal server is setup with Cityworks Desktop for those that need tools only offered in ArcMap. Licensing is configured so GIS attributes can be edited in Cityworks Anywhere by those given permission. Security for feature classes is controlled with NT authentication in SDE.
“Cityworks in the field allows our field staff to have real-time access to service requests, work orders, and GIS inventory assets,” states Daniel Hewitt, GIS Specialist, City of Woodland. “This enables them to enter their labor, material, and equipment in a single instance, making it a more efficient and moving the City towards a paperless workflow process. Having Cityworks Anywhere also offers the end users a mapping solution which uses the City’s enterprise geodatabase as the common and authoritative data source. This allows work orders to be associated with GIS assets and used to generate reports and identify problem areas. It facilitates analysis and preventive planning, moving away from a reactionary maintenance model. End users also have the ability to edit GIS attributes in the field and submit redlines to office GIS staff for updating the GIS. GIS features are constantly analyzed and verified for accuracy by the field crew staff. As a result, Public Works has taken ownership of the GIS inventory and in turn has made GIS a valuable asset to the entire organization.”
Daniel Hewitt- GIS Specialist, J Kimura- Database Administrator, City of Woodland, California
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