Challenge

San Mateo County manages over $100 million of infrastructure assets such as roads and sewer infrastructure, equipment and facilities. The County uses Hansen’s off-the-shelf Computerized Maintenance Management software to catalog all assets and to create preventative maintenance schedules. County staff adds and updates location information relevant to each asset via their Oracle Spatial Enterprise GIS. Fields in the GIS with a direct correspondence to fields in the asset management system were easily automatically updated and kept in sync. However a significant number of data fields needed to be calculated using GIS tools and then entered manually into the Hansen asset management database.

Solution

Farallon Geographics implemented a complete automated solution that would keep the two databases in sync for all types of data. Spatially derived data which previously had to be entered manually to Hansen such as the repositioning of assets, matching of unique asset identifiers between systems, and calculation of parameters could now be automatically pushed from the GIS to the Hansen database in real-time. An example would be a sewer pipe, which touches other assets such as other sewer pipes and manholes. When its position is updated in the GIS, all adjacent assets are automatically updated and this information is passed to the Hansen database. Farallon also implemented controls over the process to prevent duplication and unauthorized deletion of data.

The result is more complete and accurate data as well as a significant reduction in manual labor. Over three years, Farallon’s automation efforts are expected to yield the County cost savings of approximately 15 times their investment in this effort.