Water Ops - Scalable Water Asset Tracking Platform
Location
Australia
Client
Underground stormwater networks fail quietly, until they don't. A blocked culvert or a damaged manhole can turn a heavy downpour into flooding on someone's property, and often with little warning.
For councils managing thousands of kilometres of pipe network across sprawling catchments, staying ahead of that risk depends on knowing the condition of assets before issues arise. Traditionally, that knowledge has come reactively, with crews responding once something has already failed.
Shifting from a classic reactive management approach to proactive maintenance allows councils to get ahead of the issues, often preventing flooding before it happens.
This creates a different set of challenges though, including collecting and managing a much larger volume of asset inspections, asset-specific validation forms and processing contractor claims, especially without the process itself becoming the bottleneck.
The Water Ops suite is a collection of tools designed to support councils, water service operators and other organisations manage the operations of their three waters networks.
Within this suite is a desktop & mobile app that council teams use to plan field team activities, rapidly inspect assets with the mobile app, validate data, track progress and present it in a dashboard that can be used to show the value of the ongoing works.
With these systems all interconnected, council teams have access to updates in real-time, with inspection data and next steps updating instantly across the system as the required actions are taken by in-house teams.
Auckland Council was planning to shift its network management onto a more proactive footing and needed a system that could keep pace with the volume of inspection data that this shift would generate. They brought Morphum in to help build it with them.
Our spatial and digital team worked alongside Auckland Council to shaping the asset tracking tool around how their inspectors, contractors and asset planners needed to use it day to day.
The platform follows a clear flow with support from automations:
Staff assess asset locations that require inspections / maintenance using the map tool in the desktop app. This can be combined with in-built multi-criteria analysis to automatically filter assets or classify highest priority assets. Inspections are then assigned to field teams.
With the assets allocated, they appear in the mobile app ready for field teams to inspect. With collection forms designed from the ground up to simplify and speed up the task of reporting, the app utilises automations and dropdowns, and continues to work even when offline, so teams aren’t left in the dark in remote locations.
Managers can review maintenance actions and inspections, all updated in real-time from the field teams. Each asset has an inspection history, including a tailored list of fields and photos of the assets, to help ensure recorded data is accurate and help plan the next maintenance works.
Managers can show the value of their programmes and inspections with a summary dashboard of region-wide ongoing works, or scope right down to the individual site level. With an interactive map and custom data filters, these teams can report on any metric they record to present stakeholders the real value of the work that these teams do.
When Watercare Waikato needed a similar capability on a much shorter timeline, our GIS team didn't have to reinvent the wheel. We adapted the same underlying model into a reduced, faster-to-deploy version built for a smaller asset base and delivered within 12 weeks. Now, this organisation has access to a structured, purposeful asset tracking tool that was able to target the smaller set of specific asset types, with lower investment required up-front.
The lighter version runs on the same architecture with deliberately fewer asset types, reduced geometry and a staged rollout to allow teams from all regions to adopt it quickly, and keep running it themselves. The lesson from running the same platform at two very different scales is that proactive stormwater management doesn't require every council to build a custom system from the ground up, or settle for disconnected tools that don't scale as they grow. The same underlying model can flex to fit the asset base, the team size and the timeline in front of it, while still giving councils the same benefit of clearer, faster decisions about where flood risk sits in their network, and fewer surprises when the rain comes.
In the platform’s first year in Auckland alone, the platform has:
With all of this data in one, central location, teams can get ahead of the potential stormwater issues, helping to protect their communities, properties and environment from flood risk.
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