Commencement of GIS Enterprise Project for the General Directorate of Water in the Eastern Region, Ministry of Water and Electricity-KSA

Date of Publishing: 18/11/07

In the field of utilities, a majority of water and sewage management service providers use GIS technology to integrate all kinds of information and applications with a geographic component into one, manageable system. GIS allows such clients to organize, manage, and distribute geographic information gathered from various databases while maintaining data integrity and focusing on project direction.

One such example is the General Directorate of Water in the Eastern Region, where ESRI Northeast Africa in association with Al-Moammar Information Systems Co. (MIS), one of the greatest system integrators and ESRI’s official distributor in Saudi Arabia, have recently been awarded the contract for building a GIS Enterprise Solution for the Directorate of Water for the management of their water and sewage networks. The project covers the geographic areas of, Al-Dammam and Al-Khobar.

The solution to be developed is based on ESRI NeA’s Water and Sewage Utilities Solution, and will be developed using ESRI's state of the art ArcGIS Server technology. The solution delivers a set of GIS applications that increase the efficiency and effectiveness of day-to-day activities and raise customer satisfaction, by accelerating response to complaints. Furthermore, ESRI NeA’s Water & Sewage Utilities Solution aims to empower users with portable GIS applications that accelerate their field work, and integrates seamlessly with third party systems such Remedy’s Emergency System, which will be employed in the developed solution. This is in addition to the provision of GIS Professional Services to enhance data preparation and entry efforts, and capacity building services that are delivered at the end of each phase of the project so as to ensure that the staff is well adapted with the new technologies and applications.

ESRI NeA’s Water & Sewage Utilities Solution is formulated of several applications that cater to the various needs of entities within this industry. The Administration Module is an application that allows users to control user groups and user authentications & privileges, in addition to managing the developed applications and data available in the Geodatabase (GDB), as well as creating versions of the GDB as required. A Query Module enables users to easily search for and query both tabular and geographic data, enquire about the details of a specific network’s components, as well as retrieve data about networks and ownership within a specific piece of land.

The Editing Module provides a variety of tools for editing and updating geographical data about water and sewage networks. It also allows for the entry of hypothetical data related to the network’s resources for analysis purposes. As for the Client’s Services Module; it is an application that manages all aspects related to client complaints and requests for services. Clients can easily request water or sewage network services to their residence location through texting the system via their mobile devices. The system then automatically checks if services can be extended to the requested location and responds accordingly by extending the request to the designated department, or replying to the customer’s request with reasons why services cannot be extended. Furthermore, customers can request their services bills via the same mobile texting system.

A Reporting and Statistical Module has been created to aid decision makers in looking at data owned objectively, identifying trends and problem areas, and projecting these statistics visually on the maps. The system also enables users to produce reports as desired about various network components’ details, and trends. Finally, a GIS Mobile Application Module enables field workers to update details and data about network components by allowing them to extract sections of the database as desired, and importing the updated data back into the geodatabase upon completion of field work.

In short, ESRI NeA’s complete Water & Sewage Utilities solution allows clients to reduce operating costs, eliminate data redundancy, increase data integration and efficiency, automate analysis processes, and utilize the information in their systems more effectively.