Central Arkansas Water (CAW) is a metropolitan water system serving a population of approximately 400,000 residential, commercial, industrial, and master-metered water customers across five counties. CAW customers include the City of Little Rock, and more than a dozen other cities and communities of central Arkansas.
CAW is currently using Cityworks in its distribution, customer service, administration, and engineering departments. Running a combination of Cityworks Server AMS and Desktop technology for specific user requirements, CAW has leveraged one centralized database configuration with Cityworks. Using Cityworks Datapump, CAW has more than sixty users running the software on laptops in the field. Cityworks leverages APIs for on-line customer problem reporting. Cityworks’ Designer tool allows staff to extend, configure, and customize the program without custom programming.
“With Cityworks, we have been able to leverage our investment in Esri software and our geodatabase, extending our GIS capabilities,” stated CAW GIS manager, Vince Guillet. “Central Arkansas Water has converted treatment plant assets into existing geodatabase architecture to allow one system for both linear and vertical asset management.”
Since implementing Cityworks, CAW has moved from paper-based work orders to a nearly 100% digital work management process. Tracking work order costs down to the asset level, information derived from Cityworks is used for reporting, capital improvement planning, online and in-house customer service request tracking, tracking work order cost by project, and storeroom warehouse inventory management. For tracking compliance and reporting on US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) initiatives, such as Effective Water Utility Management (EUM) standards, Cityworks is used to track items such as the number of leaks per mile of pipe, number of water quality complaints, and so on.
“Cityworks has provided Central Arkansas Water with a virtually paperless process, capturing more detailed information and attaching it to each asset to be used for capital improvement planning,” continued Guillet. “Our reporting process has been simplified, specifically for items required by the EUM standards. We can now schedule and track work more efficiently, and preventative maintenance work orders are automatically generated. It’s easier to access existing data to see if problems are recurring due to certain pipe configuration or system conditions.”
CAW is currently expanding their Cityworks user base to include the customer service field section, which is responsible for high-volume work order management related to meter shutoffs, meter checks, re-reads, and other meter-related issues. They will be implementing Cityworks Server AMS for this group, which will enable them to utilize the field worker mode so that they can use iPad tablets to access Cityworks. Using JSON web services, they plan to integrate directly to their Customer Information System enQuesta by Systems and Software. This will allow the customer service department to open and close work orders in both Cityworks and enQuesta, and have them automatically routed to the appropriate database, keeping each system constantly updated.
CAW also plans to implement a more formal condition assessment and inspection process to take advantage of Cityworks’ asset analytics and heat mapping functionalities. They also want to start using Cityworks Analytics to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for EUM reporting.
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