Summer is winding down, so we thought we’d take this opportunity to report on a few things we spent our summer working on and some things you’ll see in the fall.
First, you can now follow us on Twitter at ESRITeamWater – we’ll be providing updates via twitter about our activities, information for our water, wastewater and stormwater customers and also when we’ve posted updates to the resource center.
And we have quite a few updates on the way….
Costing Tools
Those of you who were lucky enough to attend the UC in July, you saw us present our “costing tools” for ArcGIS Desktop. We are now doing some final code revisions and documentation and will be posting this new template to the resource center in the next few weeks.
For those that haven’t seen the costing tools yet, they are a set of desktop tools designed to help you cost out capital improvement projects or really cost out any type of project with GIS. The concept is that you can either choose assets that are in your GIS and select them for replacement and the tools will look up against a cost table to determine the replacement costs. The cost table is fully customizable and you can do some things like have default replacement types for materials – for example if you always replace transite pipes with ductile iron, than that will be pipe type used for your replacement project and that will drive your replacement costs. Also you can choose to add or extend mains or pipes to get costs for water main extension or sewer expansion projects.
We’ll also be providing some geoprocessing models to help you make system rehab and expansion decisions. We’ve had a lot of discussions with water and wastewater utilities about how to make some generic models to assist in condition assessment and decided that it would be more impactful if we created some models that showed you how you can use GIS and geoprocessing to make rehab decisions. Than you can customize the models for your utility’s information, workflows & asset rehab priorities.
To be fair, the costing tools are more of generic toolset and you’ll also see the costing tools as a template for pavement management on the soon to be launched ESRI Public Works Resource Center. So if you are looking for an end-to-end solution for condition & risk assessment that leverages your investment in GIS data, we suggest you check out some ESRI business partner solutions such as CapPlan from MWH Soft or MRP from Advantica.
Editing Template Update
As you may have heard, we are also working on an update to the editing template that will expand the editing toolbar for both water and wastewater.
Wastewater Focus
Over the next few months you’ll see us begin to add more wastewater information and templates to the Water Resource Center. So, while decided to start with water (hey, you have to start somewhere) we are going to add more content for wastewater and stormwater.
Water & Wastewater Utility Training Plan
We are wrapping up a GIS training plan specifically for our water and wastewater customers. The intent of the training plan is to give water utilities a tool to help them make training decisions by recommending GIS training courses by both typical staff roles within a utility (mapping technician, engineer, DBA, etc) as well as buy department (IT, planning, operatins) . So for example, we can help recommend training course for engineers that want to use GIS for lightweight analysis and ad hoc mapping or for folks in the IT department who need a better understanding of how GIS fits into their enterprise.
The training plan is designed to be customized for specific utilities. So you can work with an ESRI training consultant to identify what your organizational and GIS goals are and then based on the size of your utility we can recommend training options. And the training plan will be free of charge!
Public Works Resource Center
We’ll be launching a Public Works resource center soon that will compliment the Water Resource Center. So you can go to the public works resource center for information about managing pavement, street furniture, signs, facilities, snow plow routing, solid waste pickup, etc and use the Water Resource Center for information about GIS for water, wastewater and stormwater.
Your feedback
As always, your feedback guides much of our future plans. So if you’d like to make suggestion please email us at ArcGISTeamWater@esri.com, post a comment to this blog or use the water/wastewater discussion forums.