Needs Assessment for Integrated Asset Management

Clark Regional Wastewater District is one of the largest wastewater districts in the State of Washington and provides professional wastewater services to more than 81,000 people throughout Clark County. The District wanted to understand the requirements for developing and optimizing its integrated asset management system and migrate to a GIS-first approach internally. Working with their engineering team and staff from the back office to field crews, FLO worked with the client to establish the District’s overall goals. 

FLO conducted an extensive needs assessment covering hardware, software, data, and resources associated with data management and GIS. FLO also dove deeply into the District’s existing engineering workflows, looked at optimization opportunities by reducing workflow redundancies, incorporated new technologies, and improved project management, reporting, and visibility. We enhanced and automated the integration of systems to improve daily management of the District’s infrastructure. This included greater use of mobile devices for field data collection, better access to GIS data in the field, increased integration of systems and data, and the implementation of electronic field forms and review tools to eliminate paper workflows and reduce duplication.

From the needs assessment, FLO developed a comprehensive series of recommendations and tasks designed to get the District to where it wanted to be with Enterprise GIS while ensuring that future systems could be accommodated. FLO implemented a series of improvements, including updating their infrastructure demand analysis processes, enhancing project management and customer data through GIS integration, developing CAD as-built processing tools, improving GIS service performance, and developing web applications. Deploying electronic field forms to simplify and streamline data flows within the organization greatly increased efficiency, data visibility, and staff agency, generating a return on investment that paid for itself within two years.