Welsh Water to Improve Private Sewer Documentation

As Kelvin Davies, GIS applications manager for Welsh Water, explained, "In England and Wales, Defra and the Welsh government have determined that private sewers and lateral drains that go beyond the boundary of the property and connect to the public sewer network should become the responsibility of local water companies from the 1st of October 2011. This means that a significant amount of engineering documentation needs to be transferred to Welsh Water from both local authorities and private organisations.

"We estimate that the length of the sewer network Welsh Water must now manage will increase from 18,000 to 36,000 kilometers. In addition, 17,000 separate engineering documents, mostly in legacy formats, will need to be geo-referenced, managed, digitised, and added to the existing geospatial information system (GIS) data."

Welsh Water will accomplish this using ProjectWise and ProjectWise Geospatial Management. The latter extends the ProjectWise environment with a geospatial view and gives spatial context to virtually any type of information. Said Davies, "With the help of this software, Welsh Water will be able to access all of this heterogeneous engineering information through a map-based interface, enhancing our ability to efficiently and effectively manage this crucial data and provide our customers with a still higher level of service."

Being able to better maintain and, thereby, better leverage its hydraulic models will save Welsh Water a significant amount of money. Over the past several years, the utility has made a big investment in hydraulic models but lacked an engineering content management system to help maintain them. As a result, it's been difficult for Welsh Water to keep its models up to date, manage version control and revisions, and establish centralised and efficient workflows to which the entire modeling team could adhere. The introduction of ProjectWise will improve each of these processes and reduce the costs associated with them, including the cost of ensuring model accuracy.