Local government, public works, and utility organizations rely on many critical business systems to support their operations. From work management and customer service to finance and human resources, municipal staff are often required to access multiple software platforms to determine proper courses of action.
By connecting third-party systems and outside data sources to Cityworks and ArcGIS, you can configure processes that trigger actions directly within Cityworks and vice versa. Implementation beyond the core Cityworks product can dramatically streamline workflows by eliminating the need to retrieve information from several independent systems. Not only does this save valuable staff time—it also improves data integrity and decision-making.
We’ve compiled a list of the seven business functions most commonly integrated with Cityworks. While this is not an exhaustive list, it provides a good overview of the options available to your organization as you look for new opportunities to streamline your operations.
Read: 5 Keys to Unlocking a Complex System Integration
Finance Systems
One of the most common Cityworks integrations involves connecting a finance system, like JD Edwards, that contains the organization’s employee and vendor information. Employees, team assignments, and labor rates can be stored in the finance system and used to calculate both the cost of work orders and employee paychecks—keeping a consistent rate between the two. When employees and vendors are added, updated, and deactivated in the finance system, the changes would automatically be reflected within Cityworks. Email notifications can be sent to Cityworks administrators for review as appropriate.
Additional equipment, labor, and material information can also be fed to Cityworks from the finance system. As work orders are completed, costing information can be sent back to the finance system in order to update the remaining project budgets. Work order status can also be updated and synced between both systems.
Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV)
Cityworks integrates with several CCTV pipe inspection management systems, including WinCan and ITpipes. The valuable data collected by these systems can help organizations automate the creation and prioritization of work orders based on condition criteria. Some integrations allow users to include hyperlinks to specific pipe segment videos in the GIS data, enabling engineers to view GIS data and media files in one environment.
Customer Information Systems (CIS)
Customer information and billing systems are valuable repositories of customer-related data. As customer service representatives recording incoming requests for new utility service, for example, a corresponding inspection or service request could be automatically generated in Cityworks. Attachments or comments from one system can easily be accessed through the other, making information more transparent.
Some communities use customer relationship management tools like Salesforce or a 311 application to track incoming service requests across the entire organization. When applied on an enterprise level and integrated with Cityworks, this type of integration can help direct work to the right departments while keeping management, field crews, call takers, and customers informed.
Fleet Management
Many aspects of fleet management are still conducted using paper forms or siloed systems. However, Cityworks can leverage information from an authoritative vehicle and parts inventory to add, update, or deactivate vehicular assets. These vehicles can then be used as equipment in work orders with associated rates or tracked as assets with preventive maintenance cycles. Organizations can set up service thresholds that automatically flag vehicles for scheduled maintenance and, once the vehicles are in the shop, mechanics can eliminate their paper forms by accessing and updating their work orders on tablets.
Pavement Management
Road maintenance and prescriptive treatments determined by a pavement management system can be automatically loaded as work orders into Cityworks. Once the work is complete, that information can be passed back into the pavement management system for cost tracking as well as updating conditions or timing milestones for future work.
Utility Locates
Most utilities provide a public, 811-style utility locate service, either internally or through a third-party application. Typically, the responsible agency receives an email notifying them of an incoming request—resulting in a high volume of emails that need to be reviewed and acted upon. A script can be set to monitor the email inbox and parse incoming messages to automatically create service requests in Cityworks. As those requests are closed, a message is then sent back to the 811 system to update the status and notify the requestor.
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)
Sensors from a SCADA system can relay information to trigger sensor-based activities in Cityworks. This is useful when operational runtime status requires more frequent activities than provided simply by calendar-based preventive maintenance. It also allows organizations to monitor asset conditions against physical thresholds and automatically create work orders for emergency or reactive maintenance—helping staff easily track their response efforts as the event progresses.
C. Michael Parma is a water solutions architect at GISinc. Contact him at info@gisinc.com.
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