Tim Stanley – United Utilities

Our Strategy and vision – History of

GIS in UU

1900 – 1994

• Asset records hand drawn in a number of individual local

drawing offices.

• Wax on linen drawings, 1250 plans, manhole cards, trial

hole records.

• No uniform data capture standards in place.

• Sewer maintenance carried out partly in house, partly by

local authorities.

Strategy and vision – History of GIS

in UU

1994: First UU GIS – WaterGS

• Autodesk based product, integrated with

customer contact and work management

mainframe systems.

• Significant programme of digitising on and

offshore to create digital records for the

first time.

• Used to manage water assets, land and

property boundaries and incidents.

1997: Wastewater assets are migrated

into WaterGS

1997 – 2011:

• Business requirements drive development

of further GIS solutions, MapInfo,

Strumap, Map Extreme etc.

Map

InfoStrumap

What’s wrong with this picture?

Capital projects

Field reports Network Updates Data everywhere!

transfer

extract

manually update

transfer

extract

manually update

Map/geographic information available to the relevant business areas

Water GS

Why We Needed to Change

A consistent view of our network – wherever you are, whatever you do!

One

mapping

system

Step 1: Where Do We Need To Be

Step 2. Check The Foundations:

Data Work Package

• Data required migration from a number of sources, either current corporate

recognized master data sets or stand alone business data sets.

Our chosen migration path was:

• Data Discovery determining the data to be

migrated – UU / 1Spatial.

• Extract – United Utilities.

• Cleanse – 1Spatial.

• Transform to new data model – Wipro.

• Load to the new solution – Wipro.

• Total number of data sets migrated – 357.

• Total number of features migrated – 49,080,047 (including ALL attribution).

Strengthen the Foundations: Data

Improvement

• Three main themes:

• Data Cleansing: correcting spatial and non-spatial errors (e.g. where

pipes/sewers were not connected at nodes due to digitising errors.

• Data Enrichment: completing missing attribution on existing assets;

either by reference to other datasets, by association with other

connected assets, or automatic derivation by domain experience.

• Data Inference: the creation of missing assets using knowledge from

other UU and reference to external authoritative datasets (e.g. OSMM

and AL2).

Data Results: Cleanse and Enrichment

Data Cleansing

• Clean water connectivity – improved from 73% to 99%

• Wastewater connectivity – improved from 76% to 93%

Data Enrichment

• Clean water attribution completeness increased from 36% to 93% for key

attributes (material, size, age), using investment prioritisation reference data

in addition to lead risk and, ‘estimate from neighbours’ rules.

• Wastewater attribution completeness improved from 3% to 91% for key

attributes (material, size, age, invert levels and depth), using investment

prioritisation reference data in addition to the ‘estimate from neighbours’

rules.

Data Results: Data Inference

• Inferring the route of unknown assets, resulting from historic partial records capture.

• Using United Utilities wastewater subject matter knowledge alongside the 1spatial

team and Radius Studio tools, we managed to build, test, improve and implement a

set of business rules to derive the position of unmapped sewers -

Before After

Data Results: Data Inference

• Using our data inference techniques, we created:

– 7,000kms of sewer pipelines (Ex Section 24 sewers)

– 880,000 clean water service connections

• Recognising the benefits of the inferencing techniques, we have since

completed a further project to create a geographic model of our transferred

sewer assets:

– 3 months of iterative workshops to collect and express business domain

knowledge as a set of expert rules.

– Automated transferred sewers inference took 2 days to build the

inferred network for the entire region – creating 31,000km of network.

Step 3. Design & Build

• Industry standard off

the shelf package.

• Tools for network

design, asset

investment

prioritisation &

modelling.

• Stored views for

main map users.

• Data governance

assigned for layers

and local champions

for user support.

Desktop: ESRI ArcMap 10

• Improved

submission of

updates (red-

lining)

• Live valve status

changes from field

to centre

• Overnight update

from database and

data on call

replaces quarterly

manual process

Water & Ww Field: Arc GIS Mobile

• Easy navigation

and open to all

staff

• Advanced tools

including query,

draw and share

• Aerial photography

and street view

links

• Stored views for

main map users

Web: Latitude Geocortex ‘onemap’

• Site Area

account details

can be modified

by customers on

line and queued

for approval and

billing change

External User: Site Area

Step 4. Business Change & Delivery

Dedicated business change

work stream from early in the

project. – Key in assuring

solution fitness.

Business lead with joint

responsibility with IT delivery

manager and programme

manager for delivery.

Business readiness group

(BRIG) meetings monthly to

review progress.

Commitment cards provided to

all users to clarify scope and

set expectations

Business Change & Delivery

Assignment of Data Stewards and GIS

Champions gave clarity on roles &

responsibilities, and provided processes

for effective data governance & business

improvement.

• Go live support was a particular success

with project team members located with

users during the first week of go-live.

Lessons learned and Next Steps

• Version upgrade

• Consolidation of address management

processes and implementation of AddressBase

• Continued development of data and

connectivity to support future requirements

• Understanding the user base; we believed we

had in the region of 500 users of applications to

be decommissioned. Later analysis revealed a

total of 925 users.

Tailor training as closely as possible to

processes, including training of any bespoke

tools for particular departments.

Success is driven by the passion and

involvement of employees, get them involved

early.