Watercare

Date: 25 August 2009

Watercare Services Limited is New Zealand's largest company in the water and wastewater industry. The company supplies bulk water to the Auckland region, an area of approximately 340 square kilometres through a regional water network. The water is supplied to six water retailers which in turn supply the water to customers in the Auckland region. The company supplies an average of 347,000 cubic metres of water daily. The water is drawn from 12 sources comprising 10 dams, the Waikato River and an aquifer at Onehunga.

The company uses GIS, which functions as an integrator of asset information including non-spatial data. All users have access to a spatial 'portal' to Watercare information on their desktop. Asset maintenance crews have GIS on handheld computers which is synchronised with network periodically.  Job-sheets as well as location information is available in the field and there is an ability to log jobs. Information held includes photos of assets (e.g. valves within manholes/sumps). Remote GIS (on handheld) is available but the trend is to create custom applications based on ArcPAD or similar.

There are two broad types of benefits from GIS seen by Watercare - in the office and in the field. In the office the benefit is that it avoids having to access data on assets via several systems (e.g. avoided training, time for searching). In the field, crews save significant time in searching for assets and it also avoids having to survey all assets. Surveyors are now only used where there are potential legal issues such as right of way for a utilities corridor.  Watercare maintains a team of 6 GIS Staff.

This case study has been taken from the Spatial Information in the New Zealand Economy - Realising Productivity Gains report, August 2009.