Utility Network Insights: Community Map of Canada Panel

November 12, 2024

Amanda Hunter

The Community Map of Canada hosted a panel of community members to share their experiences related to the Utility Network. Learn all about their unique journeys here!

In September, the Community Map of Canada hosted a panel of community members to share their experiences related to the ArcGIS Utility Network. It was moderated by Jenny Fong, team lead, Utility Technical Solutions at Esri Canada.

The ArcGIS Utility Network can be considered a next generation network management system for utilities. It has a comprehensive framework that helps manage systems such as water, sewer, wastewater, electric, gas and telecommunications systems. It gives users the ability to build and maintain a highly detailed model that supports and traces how resources will flow through the network. It also provides operational views of the normal state of a network and how it can be affected by real time world events such as storm outages or equipment failures, which can all be analyzed within the ArcGIS Utility Network.

There is no one catch-all solution for structuring and implementing a Utility Network, with each city having its own specific starting point and requirements. The panel featured representatives from 4 different cities:

Tracy Jones is the leader of geospatial client support at the City of Calgary, a centralized GIS team supporting the Enterprise Geospatial program at the City. They look after water, non-potable water, wastewater and storm water utilities, with their service area being the entirety of the City of Calgary. They are at the early stages of implementing the Utility Network, under a broader technical refresh for the city called the Water Assets Technology Spatial Utility Network WATSUN project. They aim to complete the water and non-potable water network by the end of 2025 (with storm and the wastewater network targeted by the end of 2026).

Nigel Forster is the GIS specialist (special projects) for the City of Medicine Hat. He works inside the Enterprise GIS team and is responsible for the delivery of GIS services and technical support to internal and external users. The City has 5 utilities; water, storm water, sewer, gas and electricity, with a service area over 120km2. They have begun their Utilities Network implementation on their sewer and water utilities, with 4 phases identified.

Jamie Hart is the manager responsible for GIS and asset management for the City of Brandon. Working closely with Nicholas Malazdrewicz who is a geomatics specialist, the two of them manage the water distribution network for the City of Brandon. The City recently completed a two year project aimed at implementing the Utility Network for water distribution.

Jordan Rogers manages the Enterprise GIS team for the City of Kingston. He was accompanied by Samantha Zaluski, a GIS technician with Utilities Kingston. The Enterprise GIS team manages the GIS platform, associated integrations, and provides GIS support to all the business units, departments and City entities (including Utilities Kingston). The City chose to start their Utility Network implementation with fiber and they are nearing completion of the model implementation. Following the model implementation, a large-scale data collection and model population exercise will be conducted by Utilities Kingston.

When considering the business drivers and benefits that motivated their organizations to move toward the Utilities Network, the Cities expressed similar requirements.

These included the need to modernize outdated technologies and systems, improve overall data quality in a network, improve operational efficiencies, and leverage the Utilities Network to better maintain, model, and analyze their utility networks and data.

The City of Calgary added that being able to integrate their utilities into an asset management system was also at the forefront of their business drivers. The City of Medicine Hat saw the benefits of a services-based architecture and easier integrations across the platform and other applications, and the City of Brandon echoed this sentiment as both end users and field workers could leverage this tool.

The rate of Development Applications is ever-increasing, and the pressures from all levels of government to review and process these in a timely manner has increased over recent years. Having tighter integration between GIS, planning application platforms, and utility capacity modelling systems is expected to provide significant benefits to the City of Kingston. Master planning and capacity modelling was another driver Kingston is hoping to realize from the Utilities Network, with new opportunities for increased transparency between teams using their ArcGIS Enterprise environments. Jordan Rogers said, “Moving from annual report outputs toward closer to real-time data interactions between planning inputs, utility models, and results would increase the understanding of scenario impacts across the board.”

When considering a move towards the Utility Network, the planning process is vital to an organization’s success.

Most Cities kicked off their Utility Network projects by first speaking with their Esri Canada account managers and subsequently Esri Canada’s Utility Team. In many cases, these projects began with data readiness assessments which included actionable recommendations, allowing Cities to develop roadmaps and multi-year project plans.

The City of Calgary took an agile approach to asset and utility management. Their implementation was organized into stages, which allowed adaptability. The City of Medicine Hat kicked off their process by collaborating with their peers, including the City of Lethbridge. For Medicine Hat, having communities that were willing to share experiences, knowledge, lessons learned, and best practices was a great first step prior to developing a project plan.

For the City of Kingston, having five different utilities to migrate presented a set of unique challenges. Rather than tackle these on their own, they chose to start their Utility Network implementation on their fiber utility with support from Esri Canada. This approach allowed them to shadow Esri Canada’s resources giving them valuable experience and building their confidence and understanding of the Utility Network deployment. The City plans to complete the population of the fiber utility model themselves, however for data migration efforts such as the water and wastewater geometric networks, they are considering contracting professional services from a third party.

The success of any Utility Network project is often heavily dependent on the data. All of our panelists shared excellent insight on this critical step of their Utility Network migration project(s).

A large portion of the Utility Network effort is associated with data cleanup. While the bulk of data cleanup usually occurs towards the beginning of any migration project, in many cases, it can stretch throughout the entire project life cycle. Often tools such as Esri’s Data Reviewer and FME are used to identify and resolve topology errors prior to the migration.

For the City of Calgary, data quality was the focus, as they wanted to avoid having to re-work the data. In Calgary’s case, the source data had no spatial connectivity, and as a result required significant cleaning and editing. The source attributes were also freeform text, which required cleanup and standardization. Calgary’s “tiny utility network,” approach segmented the city into smaller, manageable geographic regions, allowing them to complete their data cleanup, piece by piece.

For the City of Medicine Hat, data cleanup was done outside the department. Initially, they used Esri Canada’s Professional Services team to complete a data readiness review. The results of this review were shared with the city and used to review records and clean the data.

When panelists were asked about some of their experiences and benefits for migrating to the Utility Network, answers included:

Increased capacity for online editing and tracing.
The seamless integration between capacity modelling and GIS.
More reliable information for decision making.
Ability for the desktop tools to be in the hands of field users.
Modernization of technology.
Data quality has drastically improved with built-in QA/QC logic.
More confidence in the data.
Ability to better understand the data.

The panelists were also asked to describe some of the roadblocks they faced or were expecting to face during their implementations.

Most agreed that the benefits of moving to the Utility Network were well understood among their own teams. However, communicating the importance and benefits of moving to the Utility Network to the rest of the organization outside of the GIS team (and getting it prioritized) has been a challenge.

Related to this is the need to increase support across the organization, promoting collaboration between departments to share information, documentation, and ensure alignment of systems, processes, and workflows.

A few cities indicated there was a learning curve for understanding realistic expectations and timelines for project implementation.

The key take-aways and lessons learned through Utility Network projects included the following:

There is more than one way to get to the desired outcome.
Start small and start early - things take longer than anticipated.
Anticipate data cleanup will be a requirement.
Ask for help! Don’t try to do it on your own.
Engage Esri Canada on a regular basis so you have support when you “get stuck.”
Communicate WHY the Utility Network is important to the organization.
Raise awareness to grow support (and buy-in) from other stakeholders.
Ensure you identify who will be responsible for editing, updating, and maintaining the data.