How to Transform Collaboration Across Your Water Utility

White Paper

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How to Transform Collaboration Across Your Water Utility

How to Transform Collaboration Across Your Water Utility

WHITE PAPER

Introduction Maintaining a seamless workflow between water utilities and their consultant groups is paramount in successfully managing multiple project timelines, resources, and deliverables. Productivity and operations can be delayed by setbacks or errors that stem from day-to-day tasks, such as locally saved work that is not backed up and inefficient version-control management. For example, if your organisation has team members who work on the same hydraulic model at the same time, they probably generate several versions of the same model file. When this happens, keeping track of model file versions and model changes is next to impossible.

Innovyze Workgroup Products

Asset Management Wastewater Modelling

Water Modelling

The Innovyze Workgroup Products have been built to advance performance by streamlining communication, improving collaboration and providing better management of data sharing and storage. This benefits water utilities and consultants by improving efficiency, delivering faster and more effective results across all departments and business entities.

The innovative water supply, asset management, storm/sewer and flood workgroup enable water utilities and their consultants to better plan, design, model and holistically manage their water ecosystem.

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How to Transform Collaboration Across Your Water Utility

Workgroup products share a common database for seamless data sharing to deliver transformational benefits.

• Collaborative – Flexible shared database (multi-user)

• Efficient – Distributed working (results achieved quicker)

• Compliant – Fully auditable environment (one version of the truth)

• Innovative - Leverage latest tech (maximum productivity)

4 Key Areas the Workgroup Products Benefit: 1. Challenge: Data Access Single-editing processes can be massively inefficient for large teams, especially when only one person can access the product at a time. In the case of managing and working with various modelling or asset management projects, teams typically struggle to find the right project file effectively. For instance, if a team member makes their own model version or continues to edit client files without tracking changes this can lead to a lot of wasted time for the next team member looking to review or make edits on the most recent version.

Solution: Centralised Multi-User Database Having one database to store all your models’ input and results, network topography and additional information, requires less time to capture data. The centralised multi-user database allows for multiple people in various locations to access the data and edit the same network simultaneously, ultimately increasing productivity through projects. For water utilities, the benefits of workgroup products reside in the fact these products offer a very productive and flexible environment enabling teams to effectively handle multiple networks and systems.

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How to Transform Collaboration Across Your Water Utility

2. Challenge: Tracking Edits and Updates Different model versions can reside on servers and computers of individual team members and even in other organisations. Picking up modelling from where someone else has left off can be complicated and a waste of time when trying to figure out what is the most current version. If the model data does not include a source for modifications and edits, it can be hard to trace where various issues began as they start to develop. If there is a mistake with a project, rolling back changes can be very limited and there is no way to get back to an earlier version, unless a multitude of files were saved.

Solution: Version Control The workgroup database is built around a central copy of the Master Database. Multiple users can perform edits locally then merge their edits to the master copy by committing their changes. There is a built-in conflict resolution tool to streamline edits from multiple users. This Merge/Commit approach means there is always one version of the truth.

The master copy also includes a full version history used to track changes and can open any previous version of the model. This effectively gives users an unlimited Undo/Redo function where model versions can be rolled back or branched off. This also helps with model auditing as it provides full visibility of which users made the edits and when and why they were made. Plus, version tracking can be done for the whole model network and for individual elements.

What does this mean?

• Having data network and model versions kept within the same database object allows for more efficiency.

• Within the object are multiple previous versions which can be opened, modified and viewed, providing more flexibility.

• You can easily compare previous versions to see who and when the changes were made, ultimately gaining better traceability.

• Built-in conflict resolution for multi-users.

• Version control of each individual asset.

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How to Transform Collaboration Across Your Water Utility

3. Challenge: Audit Trail Being able to review an audit trail of all model changes made by multiple team members for numerous projects is a key benefactor in ongoing productivity. If you are not able to review who is doing the work and/or edits on the models it can limit your communication and efficiency collaborating on multiple projects.

Solution: Quality Assurance Flagging allows the recording of the sources and therefore not losing the integrity of data against assets and parameters. Ensuring the quality of the data sources and/or why the parameters might have changed. Models are held in a version-controlled system, where users can view, compare, and edit older versions of the model or part of the model.

4. Challenge: Isolated Data Asset management systems, hydraulic models, and real-time models each have a unique value for users, yet that value is limited as data remains in silos. Allowing data to fall to the wayside and become isolated eliminates its potential to be a valuable contribution to your asset.

Solution: Data and Solution Integration The workgroup products create a common workspace for collaborators to work out of and leverage data sharing from within the same platform. Altogether, the workgroup products enhance a wider ecosystem of information and project development.

The integration between these products can also be automated using product Interexchange’s capability so hydraulic models can be built and calibrated, ensuring sustainable hydraulic models with no user intervention. This technology breaks down data silos and ensures for continual productivity by eliminating any error-prone manual processes.

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How to Transform Collaboration Across Your Water Utility

Using the Innovyze Workgroup Products users have the opportunity to improve efficiency and collaboration across drainage design, storm and sewer flood modelling, water distribution, and asset management. Overall, the key benefits of the workgroup products are they each provide one version of the truth for their respective user group, whether water distribution, wastewater or asset management users. This allows for multiple users to work, share and store simultaneously, leading to maximum team productivity.

About Innovyze Innovyze is a global leader in building innovative, industry-leading software for the water industry

for over 35 years. Innovyze serves thousands of clients including the largest utilities, ENR design

firms, consultancies and refining plants around the world. Learn more at www.innovyze.com

LEARN MORE

The Workgroup Products are at the core of Innovyze solutions with seamless data sharing, flexibility in importing and exporting across external data sources that support wider solution integrations.

Improve efficiency and collaboration across drainage design, storm and sewer flood modelling, water distribution, and asset management.

https://store.innovyze.com/StormwaterSewerFlood/InfoWoICM?cclcl=en_US