Flyability, the market leader in confined spadrone inspections, has announced a new partnership with WinCan, the global leader of smart sewer inspection software. Together, Flyability and WinCan are unveiling a custom integration between Flyability’s Elios 3 drone and WinCan’s Web solution. This will streamline data management, making it possible to convert drone-captured sewer data into industry standard-compliant reports.

Initial Situation and Challenges

Before implementing WinCan solutions, creating reports in our company was an extremely time-consuming and complex process. The image data from sewer TV recordings were manually integrated into Word documents and supplemented with overview diagrams. This manual process took a lot of time and significantly complicated both management and data exchange. Dependence on an external partner for larger projects further limited our flexibility. When our business partner dissolved in 2012, we decided to overcome this bottleneck by acquiring our own vehicle system and the "ProTouch" reporting solution from WinCan. A year later, we expanded our system with a WinCan VX license, laying the foundation for future-oriented, independent reporting and management of our projects.

Manhole inspections pose complex challenges for inspection crews and maintenance planners. Not only do they require different camera equipment than pipelines, but manhole inspections also have different data collection needs including multi-level inspection procedures.  

WinCan Mobile is a sewer inspection application for smart devices that helps collect, organize and share manhole inspection data. It allows operators to quickly record asset dimensions, material, construction, system information and much more. This data is tied to a geographical location, which allows users to transfer data into GIS software and support planning via asset management integrations like Trimble’s Cityworks or CentralSquare EAM.

You can also snap photos of the asset’s condition, making it easy to identify key defects and determine future maintenance. When inspections are complete, the project syncs back up to WinCan Web, where it can be processed and reviewed.  

Streamline Manhole Project Creation

Serving more than 80,000 people in Goleta Valley, California, the Goleta Sanitary District is on a mission to promote public health and environmental safety. The District has made major investments in a long-range capital improvement plan that seeks to consolidate data formats and conduct essential replacement and rehab projects over ten years. The plan uses detailed criteria to correct structural and hydraulic defects for nearly 7,000 underground assets, minimizing risk of infrastructure failure throughout the collection system.

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Since 2012, the pipe cleaning company Point Orange Sewer Cleaning GmbH has been offering drain, pipe & sewer cleaning service to its community of Bispingen, Germany. Their services include property drainage, clog removal, sewer cleaning, sewer milling, sewer location, sewer and pipe rehabilitation, and also CCTV inspection. 
For the past two years, the company has been using WinCan software for sewer maintenance, and in cooperation with a Vivax Metrotech locator, the Point Orange team has been able to both expedite and streamline workflows.

It’s impossible to ignore the impact that AI is having on utility management and the wastewater industry. Municipalities and contractors that have gotten their hands on the technology are already seeing returns, and while adoption may be gradual, forward-thinking decision-makers are educating themselves and their teams about where AI could fit into operation and maintenance workflows.

Integrating software for utilities is just one way the City of Raleigh, North Carolina, is prioritizing routine infrastructure inspections and maintenance activities. The stormwater division alone oversees 35,500 storm drains and 609 miles of pipes and culverts across the city, working to monitor and protect waterways and residential areas. As demand for maintenance increases, connected, cloud-driven technology helps the city effectively manage their assets.

Balancing the bandwidth of essential utilities can be like walking a tightrope. Employee salaries, equipment costs and a variety of operational expenses are just a few of the bandwidth constraints municipalities face. To mitigate these constraints, water utilities are turning to digital, cloud-based solutions that not only help cut down time per inspection but also eliminate various manual tasks. With the help of AI and integrated technology, utilities can do more with the employee bandwidth and equipment they already have.

Fast, simple work order creation is a key component of efficient sewer inspection workflows. WinCan makes it easy to create work orders on the fly from anywhere with our cloud-based inspection platform.

When Sewermatics hit the market in 2021, it changed the way inspection teams thought about condition assessment and coding. Suddenly, utilities could offload thousands of inspections for processing through WinCan’s AI engine, and results started turning major workflow backlogs into safely stored, ready-to-use sewer data. Entering 2023, Sewermatics AI scanning has come to WinCan’s cloud environment to deliver a sewer inspection experience that both expedites workflows and alleviates workloads.