Welsh Water adds Bentley project software
7 Sep 2011
London – “In England and Wales private sewers and lateral drains that go beyond the boundary of the property and connect to the public sewer network should become the responsibility of local water companies from 1 Oct.
The decision by Defra and the Welsh government will require a significant amount of engineering documentation to be transferred to water utilities from both local authorities and private organisations.
In response, D?r Cymru Welsh Water is deploying Bentley Systems’ ProjectWise project team collaboration platform. The software is designed to improve work sharing, better manage all engineering content, better leverage its existing hydraulic models for its water and wastewater networks, and reduce costs.
“We estimate that the length of the sewer network Welsh Water must now manage will increase from 18,000 to 36,000 kilometers,” said Kelvin Davies, GIS applications manager for Welsh Water.
“In addition, 17,000 separate engineering documents, mostly in legacy formats, will need to be geo-referenced, managed, digitized, and added to the existing geospatial information system (GIS) data,” he said.
Welsh Water will accomplish this using ProjectWise and ProjectWise Geospatial Management. The latter extends the ProjectWise environment with a geospatial view and gives spatial context to virtually any type of information.
“With the help of this software, Welsh Water will be able to access all of this heterogeneous engineering information through a map-based interface, enhancing our ability to efficiently and effectively manage this crucial data and provide our customers with a still higher level of service,” said Davies.
Over the past several years, Welsh Water has invested significant amounts in hydraulic models but lacked an engineering content management system to help maintain them. As a result, it’s been difficult for the utility to keep its models up to date, manage version control and revisions, and establish centralized and efficient workflows to which the entire modeling team could adhere.
According to Bentley, the introduction of ProjectWise will improve each of these processes and reduce the costs associated with them, including the cost of ensuring model accuracy.
Richard Zambuni, Bentley global marketing director for geospatial and utilities, said tha as well as its hydraulics and hydrology products, water utilities increasingly are now opting for a complete solution from us that includes ProjectWise so they can increase efficiencies across the entire enterprise.
“The valuable work performed by specialist teams such as hydraulic modelers is enhanced, and often leads to improved customer service, when it is organised and made available through collaboration servers,” said Zambuni.
“ProjectWise brings major benefits to water utilities that need to better manage their engineering content and establish well-managed workflows that embrace not only in-house engineering teams, but also the utility’s contractor ecosystem,” he claimed.
