The Palmdale Water District (PWD) is a retail water provider serving the city of Palmdale and other areas in northern Los Angeles County. The district deployed a mobile GIS application to replace paper notes used by maintenance crews.
Impact
The new technology modernized a cumbersome and error-prone process where maintenance crews took paper notes at job sites and then typed that information into Excel spreadsheets in the office. Maintenance records entered the old way were often incomplete, inaccurate and stored in random locations, making the information difficult to access and impractical for use in any type of analysis, according to PWD.
After some initial resistance, the mobile application became popular with PWD maintenance crews and is now used for most field maintenance tasks, including water system flushing, pipe and valve repair, hydrant maintenance, hydrant pressure recording, meter vault inspections, and meter replacements. In addition, other PWD departments have adopted the application for facilities site maintenance, USA Dig Alert compliance and responding to GIS map change requests.
PWD says the technology increased efficiency and improved performance for maintenance crews. Time employees spent manually inputting information is now dedicated to more valuable tasks. Color-coded maps let crews easily see where jobs have been completed and work remains to be done. And storing maintenance records in an enterprise geodatabase instead of Excel makes information readily accessible to the entire organization.
Advice
PWD says moving from paper workflows to mobile GIS, while extremely valuable, requires a substantial commitment of resources. Therefore, building stakeholder buy-in and upper management support are critical to success. The district also offers these recommendations:
- Carefully evaluate mobile GIS platforms. There are multiple options to chose from, and districts should pick the platform best suited to their needs. Cloud-based and software-as-a-service solutions can reduce up-front costs and may appeal to organizations with small IT departments. But annual subscription fees can be significant.
- Thoroughly test the solution before rolling it out to users. Once you choose a mobile GIS platform and applications, make sure the technology works correctly under real-world conditions before releasing it to field crews.
- Use quick wins to build user acceptance. Start with a single task that can be done more easily with mobile GIS technology. Have a non-technical staff member try using the application on that task for one day. The goal is for the test subject to quickly realize how much easier the technology makes his or her job and become an evangelist for the new process.
