Florida Water Utility mining data better

GREENWOOD VILLAGE, US: Critigen, a global technology consultancy for critical infrastructure, has completed work for Seminole County (Florida) Environmental Services Department (SCESD), centralizing the way it mines data across multiple platforms among field and financial operations.

“Today’s infrastructure needs are vast — but we have an unprecedented opportunity to utilize the best in visualization and collaboration applications to modernize these infrastructures. Our work with the SCESD is a prime example of helping a water utility increase its business insight through the innovative application of technology,” said Jeff Akers, Critigen CEO.

SCESD is in the midst of a major capital improvement program (CIP) to upgrade and expand the utility infrastructure to support current and projected demand for water, waste water and reclaimed water service. The utility’s technology had not kept up with the tremendous growth of the county over the past decade.

Historically, the utility’s critical information such as customer information, permits and maintenance records were stored in complex and user-restricted databases requiring systems experts to retrieve and assimilate the data for those who needed it. Over time, workers responded to evolving business needs by building home-grown, non-enterprise databases.

Critigen has delivered to the SCESD a comprehensive business intelligence tool that provides interaction between the data warehouse, collaboration tools and GIS visualization technology. With the individual applications brought into the enterprise system SCESD now has wider access, change control and data integration capabilities and can easily expand on a single version of the information.

“Our activities related to customer information, maintenance, operations and permitting now work in concert,” Andy Neff, director of the SCESD. “We can be much more proactive in identifying business deficiencies and be far more responsive to impending needs because we can access and visualize all of the information that we need to manage from a single point of entry.”

For instance, prior to driving to a job site, the SCESD can now review the site location, visualize other calls from the area and historical data and better understand if they need to plan for a short-term solution or start the process for a permanent solution that extends across multiple property lines. This saves valuable time and significantly reduces inefficiencies.

“The issues we faced are not unique among utility organizations,” said Neff. “The maintenance of the data stored in these impromptu systems was vital to SCESD’s success, but keeping it in Excel documents on people’s desktops prevented introduction of proper security, maintenance and backup procedures and moreover, kept us from fully integrating our information with our water and service delivery.

To maximize cost savings and minimize maintenance, Critigen built the Web-based application using a suite of off-the-shelf technologies to provide map- or text-based analysis, collaboration, work flow, ad hoc reporting, document management and data management.