Issue link: https://resources.esri.ca/i/1172344
Return on Investment of Evolving Your Road Network Data Management Practice Esri Canada White Paper 7 Data analysts who collect, aggregate and project data to generate reports often must amass data from various sources. Combining this data that is linear in nature is very difficult on a non-integrated system without linear referencing. Also, since the data comes from various systems owned by different managers, data requests alone can take days, followed by hours of data manipulation, which results in a lower quality report. A traditional approach typically consumes 80% of the total effort on data preparation. Often the amount of effort required is so high that some data sources are simply ignored in favour of delivering the report sooner, even if it lacks useful information! Report generation takes minutes on an integrated LRS-enabled GIS since data is already aligned and is available in simple visual layers. This cuts the number of continuous improvement projects by a factor of 5, saving data analysts several hours every week and improving the quality, usefulness and impact of reports. External contractors who provide services to the municipality, such as road condition assessment or roadside asset inventory collection would be able to securely consume the municipality's single authoritative road network and provide results in the municipality's native data structure, resulting in highly accurate and timely data with fewer errors and virtually no data integration problems. Managing projects with external contractors would be more effective because they are able to collaborate in real-time. This eliminates stale information and encourages closer partnerships, shaving hours off project management costs per week per contractor and reducing project deficiencies. A good transportation infrastructure asset management practice relies on utilizing data sources from various assets, many of which are managed by different departments. Like report generation, asset management systems must access various data sources, integrate the data and perform analysis. Proactive transportation infrastructure asset management budgets often exceed millions of dollars per year for many municipalities. If better, more integrated data was available to support maintenance decisions, asset management plans could be more effective. Even a modest 5% improvement on a $5-million annual maintenance budget by improving the quality of the supporting data made available to the asset management system would provide the municipality with an additional $250,000 per year available for maintenance activities. Asset management is one of the primary business units that benefit from an LRS-enabled GIS. Others include traffic management, road safety (such as the Vision Zero initiative), public transit, zoning & addressing, commercial truck permitting and the rapidly evolving connected and autonomous vehicle division. Each one of these functional areas within the organization use data that is generated outside their department. Effectively consuming that data to produce meaningful information without duplicating data and effort is essential for their continued success. Also vital is their ability to focus on their business and not on data management responsibilities. Business units that consume and contribute to road information can sometimes reassign the equivalent of one full-time resource per business unit by not maintaining their own copy