January 16th, 2025

Over the course of our last few blog posts, we’ve been looking at how Arches provides the tools needed for organizations to be better stewards of their most important assets.  And we believe that one of Arches’ most import features is its ability to create, visualize, process, query, and publish geospatial data.  

Additionally, as we discussed in our last post, many organizations rely on systems like ArcGIS as mission critical infrastructure. Traditional GIS is a cornerstone of effective decision-making and resource stewardship. But as we have discussed, organizations all over the world are adopting Arches because of its ability to manage key relationships (geospatial and otherwise) between resources. While this may seem like a conundrum, let us clear the air!

With Arches, you can have the best of both worlds—combine the strengths of GIS with modern, flexible technology to make business processes faster and smarter. Arches is a comprehensive data management and integration platform, designed to support resource data by giving you the freedom to create, edit, access, and integrate data however it makes the most sense for your team. Arches’ flexibility means it can quickly adapt to your unique business needs, improving efficiency and decision-making along the way.

Seamless Data Integration in Action

In many organizations, skilled enterprise ArcGIS technicians play a crucial role in managing geospatial data, efficiently creating and maintaining geospatial data with well-established workflows that streamline common tasks. Their expertise goes beyond just data management—by leveraging advanced geospatial analysis, GIS power-users can uncover critical insights into the interplay between institutional resources and constantly changing conditions such as urban growth pressures, environmental risks, and infrastructure aging. Without these specialized GIS tools and professionals, tackling such complex challenges would be nearly impossible.

That said, while ArcGIS is an extremely valuable toolset for cartographic manipulation and geodata analysis, it can be challenging to integrate ArcGIS’s geospatial capabilities with sophisticated non-spatial information. This is where Arches can step in.

Arches’ integration with esri’s ArcGIS ecosystem allows organizations to consolidate resource information using Arches’ advanced data management capabilities. Arches’ intuitive user interface allows non-technical users to access both geospatial information and sophisticated asset databases while still supporting GIS technicians’ ability to use esri’s precision GIS tools.

As showcased in this brief video, ArcGIS Pro users can access, visualize, and edit Arches resource data with the geospatial tools they know best using the add-in we developed. Using Pro, GIS staff can create or update Arches data, allowing them to contribute improvements to the geospatial representations and attributes of your authoritative resource data. Any edits to geospatial and attribute information in Arches will be automatically rendered in Pro—of course, the same applies to edits performed in ArcGIS—ensuring that Pro is working with accurate, up-to-date resource data.

Adaptable to Your Processes

Whereas traditional resource management systems might compromise your effort invested in ArcGIS, Arches celebrates it. You’ve got a specialized way of collecting and recording information? That’s great! Arches plays nice with traditional GIS in general, meaning previous investments in GIS technology aren’t rendered obsolete. The workflows that capture your most precise geospatial data don’t need to change, nor should they. With Arches/esri integration in place, Arches functions as a comprehensive system of record responsible for managing your resource inventory, an inventory that can then be accessed, updated, and extended by traditional GIS. Business processes run smoothly, whether it is uploading new resources into your inventory via ArcGIS Pro directly or via Arches’ suite of data creation tools.

With Arches, non-technical staff can access rich geospatial resource data with intuitive, easy-to-use search tools and editors, allowing them to get the benefits of the hard work data management work accomplished by the GIS team, driving efficiency throughout the organization. At the same time, GIS experts can dynamically manage your organization’s system of record using the esri tools and workflows they’ve grown to love.

By fostering seamless data integration, enhancing collaboration, and enabling data-driven decision-making, Arches helps organizations to better protect and preserve the resources they manage. In an increasingly interconnected world, the ability to integrate and use data across systems is essential for achieving the goal of safeguarding our shared and finite resources.