Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced that Stadtwerke Mainz AG, a multi-utility serving more than 300,000 citizens in the capital of Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany, is implementing an enterprise geographic information system (GIS) based on Bentley sisNET, ProjectWise, and other Bentley products.
With these Bentley solutions that advance GIS for infrastructure, all data needed to support the lifecycle of the city of Mainz’s electric power generation and supply, gas, and water infrastructure will be available to all users in real time. As a result, Stadtwerke Mainz anticipates new levels of enterprise productivity, along with an extremely fast return on its investment in this innovative technology.
Volker Wäschenbach, GIS project leader, Planning and Facilities Management, Stadtwerke Mainz, said, “Through the deployment of our new GIS, we expect our engineering processes to become more streamlined because multi-utility data will be readily accessible and more transparent – prerequisites for the steady improvement of data.
“In addition, the new GIS will help us ensure full compliance with the extensive reporting requirements of the Bundesnetzagentur, our national utilities regulator.”
Wäschenbach added, “Although we have made a substantial investment in this project, we expect to benefit from the many workflow efficiencies generated by the new Bentley solutions.” These workflow efficiencies will include:
* Easier and more efficient network documentation
* Support for “call-before-you-dig” services, with all data residing in one location and readily available to third parties who need to excavate trenches
* Electronic importation of all surveying data, saving time and money
* Improved collaboration among Stadtwerke Mainz project teams and outside contractors facilitated by the ProjectWise collaboration system, which enables users to manage, find, and share CAD and geospatial content, project data, and Office documents electronically, rather than through the transfer of paper plots
* Data consistency between the GIS and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, with ProjectWise serving as a repository for all geospatial and ERP system documents
* Increased quality of data provided to field engineers, making their work easier and more accurate and lowering project costs
How the New System Works
Currently, Stadtwerke Mainz has different ways of managing its network data. Some of the data is in MicroStation DGN files, organized in folders, and some of the network object attribute data is held in a separate database. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to ensure that the object and network connectivity data matches the attribute data. As a result, the company spends a lot of time cross-referencing network documentation data with attribute data to ensure consistency.
With the implementation of Bentley sisNET and the other Bentley solutions, all network data will reside within the enterprise GIS. The data will be available in real time to power users in the engineering community as well as read-only users, such as customer service representatives.
In addition, the GIS data will be linked to the ERP data through a Bentley sisNET Connector. This will make it easy for the network documentation team to see up-to-date attribute information from the ERP system.
Source: Bentley