The Customer: New Jersey American Water
New Jersey American Water is the state’s largest water and wastewater utility company, serving 2.8 million people in 190 communities across 18 counties. As a subsidiary of American Water, the United States’ largest investor-owned water and wastewater utility, New Jersey American Water provides clean, safe, reliable and affordable service to its customers.
The Challenge: The Perfect Map of Ortley Beach
In the past, New Jersey American Water relied on a variety of data sources to know the location of its assets. In fall of 2012, Christopher Kahn piloted a work ow that would allow field employees to map the locations of all of the utility’s water and wastewater assets. He picked the coastal town of Ortley Beach to test a field data collection workflow with a legacy handheld Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) devices.
Kahn encountered challenges such as time-consuming and error-prone data transfers from the GPS receivers to the utility’s GIS; easily overwritten files; and post-processing that offered only decimeter location accuracy. The inefficiencies added days of work to each step of his process. But, on October 27, 2012, Kahn had mapped all 7,000 Ortley Beach utility assets with 10-centimeter accuracy.
Two days later, Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey. Ortley Beach would become known nationally not for its perfect map—but for being nearly wiped off the map. Meters were buried, lids were washed away, homes were completely gone, and sometimes only a copper pipe was sticking up from the sand.
Kahn returned to the field with mobile crews to help locate assets. In Ortley Beach, he brought a tablet with his perfect map, and was able to locate meter pits within seconds of looking. But other coastal communities did not fare so well. On the same barrier island, in Mantoloking, crews spent weeks walking block by block just to locate service lines.
“All of their tap lines and drawings meant nothing,” Kahn said, “measurements were based on references that weren’t there anymore. They spent hours on each property trying to find assets and do damage assessment. In Ortley Beach, it took a few seconds. In Mantoloking, it could take hours to days to find one service line under the rubble.”
The Solution: A Laser-Guided Shovel
New Jersey American Water’s management team asked Kahn if he could map all the utility’s assets with high accuracy. Kahn estimated the ROI of such an effort. For instance, at the time, each work order took about 12 minutes — 10 minutes of which were spent interpreting sketches to find the asset. With 300,000 such work orders per year, Kahn estimated they could save 55,000 hours per year — or $2.6M — just by having survey-grade maps.
“I wanted to give our crews a laser-guided shovel to every single asset,” Kahn said.
The legacy GNSS workflow was too time-consuming to scale, so Kahn looked for a high-accuracy data-collection solution that didn’t require manual data entry and post-processing.
Kahn settled on the Arrow Gold® GNSS receiver from Canadian company Eos Positioning Systems. The Arrow Gold was a new type of GNSS receiver that used Bluetooth to provide real-time, survey-grade positions to any mobile device. There was no post-processing, and the Arrow Gold also supported Esri’s ArcGIS® data collection apps, which enabled Kahn to have the data sent from the field to office in real time, thus eliminating manual data entry.
Kahn installed an Arrow base station, which provided source of real-time differential (RTK) corrections that could be broadcasted to field workers across the entire state. With support for all four GNSS satellite constellations (i.e., GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou), the base station could provide the maximum accuracy and productivity available on the market. This was especially helpful in areas with urban canopy. With the base station, the accuracy of assets collected jumped down from 10-centimeters to sub-inch.
The Result: Millions of Dollars Saved Each Year
When Kahn started the project, he was using a special customization of an Esri Windows Mobile app. Today, he’s moved to using ArcGIS Field Maps on iOS devices, which he sees as the most flexible, scalable, and easy-to-use solution.
Kahn also tracks field work in ArcGIS Dashboards, an application that provides spatially elegant, visual summaries of GIS data. The dashboards facilitate communication with non-GIS stakeholders, including the utility’s management team.
Now that all existing assets have been mapped, every newly installed asset is also required to be posted to the GIS with sub-inch accuracy.
Today, the utility saves over $2 million each year from efficiencies directly attributed to the survey-grade maps. New Jersey American Water has. deployed over 350 Arrow GNSS receivers to maintenance crews, field service representatives (FSRs), and others.
“The Arrow GPS units are a tool in their truck, just like anything else,” Kahn said. “They can walk right up to a service line without having to spend time interpreting sketches. We know what we’re saving in operational expenses (OPEX). However, during emergencies, this is truly priceless.”
