Building Technology Enabled Planning Capability

As water and wastewater provider to more than 1.4 million rural and metropolitan residents within Auckland (New Zealand's largest city), Watercare’s mission is to provide reliable, safe and efficient water and wastewater services, and our vision is to be trusted by our communities for exception performance every day

In 2018, Watercare commenced the agile development of digital capability across the business as part of its Strategic Transformation Programme (STP). A principle feature of the STP includes the development of the right tools, and the best processes to meet our business needs. Watercare has historically been considered data rich but lacked widely available insights. A key business goal has been to create a consolidated approach to capturing, transforming, storing, reviewing, and utilising data to deliver insights according to an agreed value framework, particularly as it relates to planning the creation of new assets to meet Auckland’s growth.

The agile squad responsible for the delivery of planning functionality was humorously named ‘B-wing’, but much like the powerful, yet focussed abilities of the Starwars fighter, this high performing squad has applied powerful approaches to delivering some unique and scalable outcomes, in keeping with the original product vision and will provide true and dynamic insights in a rapidly changing environment.

This presentation will showcase progress as it relates to planning and modelling capability, and how we anticipate that improved data, processes and tools will improve the effectiveness of network planning in three key areas.

“Smart Storage” allows our key internal and external datasets to be transformed and imported or replicated in a new data lake. Automated transforms have been developed, and include quality and confidence attributes to ensure the most up-to-date data is maintained in the lake. This has required complex system integration, processes and source mapping, but has resulted in improved access, visibility and analytic capability across many datasets.

• “Improved Insights” solutions developed to date include an interactive cloud geospatial tool to access and export population data by all planning staff; publishing of hydraulic model results in an online GIS viewer with custom search and visualisation functionality; access key time series data from a variety of sources linked to assets in a GIS viewer. This has necessitated a range of new automated continuous deployment and security considerations and processes, which has provided opportunities for rich cross-team collaboration and true agile development.
• “Next Generation GIS” established a connected geometric model of our water and wastewater networks using corporate GIS data. The geometric model has been built to align with the geometry and schemas of the water and wastewater hydraulic models and outcomes have been prioritised by networks where capacity constraints are most significant. To date this has significantly reduced hydraulic model build time, but the key value is being delivered by unlocking modelling functions such as integrated hydraulic modelling and performance validation, impact assessment and tracing, and an increased range of predictive network analytics.

The future roadmap involves a consolidated “user hub” to enhance experience and collaboration functionality, improved field data capture mechanisms, validation of hydraulic models using a wider range of IOT flow and pressure sensors. System performance scenario data from more frequent model runs will be maintained for consumption by Watercare and key partners. Dashboards and federated models will enhance predictive network analytics and facilitate regional collaboration in key planning decisions.