Geneva, Switzerland — capital of the Genève canton and the second most populated city in the country — is an iconic municipality situated on the southwestern border with France. It's here at the foot of the Alps that V. Guimet Fils SA works to provide maintenance and sanitation services to improve community health and protect the local environment. With more than 100 employees and 40 rapid intervention vehicles on standby, the Guimet Fils SA team boasts 24-hour service, conducting inspections and rehabilitation projects for the entire canton, an area of over 100 square miles (280 km2).
New Work Order Management Capabilities Help Municipalities Coordinate Sewer Inspection Work and Track Progress.
WinCan Web’s enterprise features support enhanced work order management within WinCan’s secure cloud ecosystem. Equipped with a detailed dashboard for fast, click-of-a-button metrics, WinCan Web’s enterprise solution enables teams to edit, review, approve and track work orders directly from the cloud. These work orders bring together project file, section data and inspections, and with in-depth mapping capabilities built directly into WinCan Web, enterprise users can monitor work orders city-wide, allowing for faster identification of maintenance trends. They can gain insights on an entire system as a whole and then drill down into the details of specific lines and inspections. WinCan Web’s enterprise features enable municipalities and contractors to conduct essential overwatch of sewer system health, and it fits right into any WinCan workflow.
WinCan’s new downloadable quick guide, Mapping With WinCan, is a valuable resource for operators and engineers alike. With helpful descriptions and examples of tiling, layering and analysis tools, this guide introduces users to WinCan’s array of mapping features and workflows.
Sewer inspection workflows vary from one municipality to the next. They are often built around the structure of the inspection team, but equipment, budget and the size of a sewer system all play an important role in determining what workflow makes the most sense for a given community. With so many different inspection, asset management and mapping solutions on the market today, there is no end to the possibilities. Take a look at the workflows below to get an idea of how WinCan workflows compare to more traditional, manual workflows.
Data takes on new meaning when it’s laid out on a map. Heat maps, iconography and geographical features all help build a clearer picture. The human brain naturally processes images differently than it does letters and numbers, allowing us to gain a unique understanding of data sets and how they interact with each other. In the world of wastewater management, mapping data can make it easier to understand where a sewer system is located, as well as potential risks to the community and infrastructure.
Having the capability to visualize data is a crucial part of any wastewater team’s inspection workflow, and WinCan’s flexible GIS integrations makes it easier than ever to do so.
The most robust sewer inspection software in today’s market offers users many different features to optimize efficiency, so it’s important that users know how to access all elements of it. To ensure they get the most out of their purchase, WinCan offers personal training opportunities designed around the customer’s needs.
When integrated with Esri’s ArcGIS platform, WinCan VX sewer assessment software allows users to navigate and analyze inspection data using a rich GIS (geographic information system) interface. With it, users can click map features to link to section and defect information, or they can click a tabular record in an inspection to jump immediately to its mapped location. With this bidirectional link between GIS and WinCan, inspections can be pre-populated with data residing in GIS (eliminating manual data entry) and GIS data can be updated with results once an inspection is complete. Beyond simply mapping data, the ArcGIS integration allows users to filter results, create reports, browse media and build heat maps according to defect type or severity. It also assists with workflow by allowing you to select regions, assign them to specific inspection crews and then monitor per-crew progress graphically with color-coded indication.
Planning a sewer rehab project means weighing many factors for each asset: location; defect type, quantity and severity; surface obstructions; pipe material and age; and more. From his early days in the municipal world, WinCan Business Manager Mike Russin recalls using highlighters with maps tacked to the wall. “It used to be a huge hassle,” he says. “We’d watch VHS tapes, find the spot in need of rehab, use different color highlighters to mark what kind of rehab was needed, and then take the map into the engineer's office at the end of the month to get approval. There were so many hoops you had to jump through.”
What is longer than two soccer fields and weighs more than 19 African elephants? A fatberg that was recently found in east London, that’s what. The fatberg, coined ‘total monster’ by The Guardian, weighs 130 tons and is 820 feet (250 meters) long. Thames Water and Lanes Group, WinCan Web sewer asset management software users, found this massive deposit of fats, oils, grease, wipes and other household waste during a routine inspection in Whitechapel, in London’s East End. Sources say it will take sewer workers three weeks to break up the fatberg and restore the sewer pipe. Once broken up, the waste will be sucked up and taken for disposal at a local recycling plant.
