District Doubles Mobile GIS Workforce Capabilities

23 April 2009, 9:48pm

Redlands, California — April 23, 2009 — Truckee Donner Public Utility District more than doubled its number of field crew equipped with mobile geographic information system (GIS) technology thanks to unlimited licenses provided in ESRI’s Small Utility Enterprise License Agreement (SU-ELA) program. The SU-ELA program is designed to make GIS more affordable for small utilities in the United States with 100,000 meters/connections or fewer.

Truckee Donner serves 12,000 electric meters and 11,500 water meters in Northern California. Through the SU-ELA program, the utility is assured unlimited deployments to desktop, server, and mobile devices of ESRI’s ArcGIS platform, along with maintenance and support for products. Other benefits include staff training for a reduced cost and complimentary passes to ESRI’s International User Conference.

“We have saved significantly on deployment costs and now have unlimited licenses in addition to the software, maintenance, and training benefits we needed,” said Ian Fitzgerald, GIS coordinator, Truckee Donner Public Utility District. “By signing the SU-ELA, we went from 8 to 20 workers with GIS capabilities. We are now able to expand GIS to an indefinite number of users and bring our entire crew up to the level of the foreman in terms of knowledge of what’s in the field.”

With information accessible via mobile GIS devices rather than a paper map, Truckee Donner staff is able to make better decisions. Additionally, having accurate data on demand has improved the utility’s response time and customer service.

“During our winter snowfall, it can be difficult to locate facilities, but GIS helps our crews quickly find and fix leaks,” Fitzgerald said. “Also, our operations and maintenance personnel are able to use GIS-based intelligent modeling tools to quickly determine which areas need to be isolated to repair the leak.”

At the heart of the SU-ELA program is ESRI’s ArcGIS software, an open, scalable, and interoperable platform that provides a complete system to create, serve, and use geographic information. An enterprise GIS, based on ArcGIS technology, benefits designers, analysts, decision makers, field staff, and customers through mobile, Web server, and desktop applications.

SU-ELA program

Geo: International