How North East Water delivered Australia’s first intelligent water network

Abstract

To better service a 20,000 square kilometre area in regional Australia, North East Water embarked on a large-scale, remote digital transformation project to create a unified GIS and asset management system. Implemented during COVID-19, the approach enabled North East Water to significantly upgrade data quality – ensuring a full representation of the water network that is fast and scalable – with rich metadata available on over 306,000 synchronous assets. The project supports strategic planning and field operations by identifying the number of customers affected during an outage – enabling senior management to monitor and determine high incident areas. At an operational level, mobile-centric mapping improves the situational awareness of field crews, while the tracing system determines the exact valves to shut off when a pipe bursts. The web GIS platform has enabled North East Water to overcome data silos by connecting existing water and sewer modelling, the Microsoft suite and SCADA/Historian – with further integrations planned. The approach will open up a goldmine of data to the wider organisation and illustrates for the first time how an intelligent network is within reach of all utilities, with all the benefits that come with a commercial off-the-shelf solution.