How Digital Engineering Drawings helped Urban Utilities Improve Safety

The Company

Urban Utilities is a leading water distributor and sewerage service provider in South East Queensland. Serving over 1.5 million people across Brisbane, Ipswich, Lockyer Valley, Scenic Rim, and Somerset regions, Urban Utilities is committed to delivering safe and reliable water and wastewater services. They manage an extensive network of infrastructure, including water treatment plants, reservoirs, and pipelines, ensuring the community’s needs are met with efficiency and sustainability.

Urban Utilities prioritizes innovation and sustainability, continuously enhancing their services to support regional growth and environmental health. They are dedicated to exceptional customer service, engaging with the community to uphold the highest standards of quality and reliability, and strive to minimize their ecological footprint and safeguard the region’s water resources. 

The Challenge

As one of the largest water distributor-retailers in Australia, Urban Utilities services more than 1.5 million customers in South East Queensland.

Each year, the organization supplies more than 141,000ML of water to residents, and removes and treats around 124,700ML of sewage across its vast service network, which covers 14,384 square kilometers (8,937 miles).

One key element of Urban Utilities’ service delivery mandate is to maintain asset data for its water and sewerage distribution assets – some of which date back to the early twentieth century. It also aggregates the engineering data from many regional councils in South East Queensland.

With a desire to improve the overall ease and accuracy of governance, and progress its digital transformation initiative, Urban Utilities sought to migrate its asset drawings and documents from on-premise to cloud-based storage in one central solution.

The Solution

Once RedEye was selected as the solution of choice, Urban Utilities worked closely with the Accruent team to aggregate and validate its engineering data, and structure and tag its vast pool of engineering data.

By the time the implementation project was complete, a large number of documents and drawings from other systems, hard drives and network drives were migrated into the new drawing management ecosystem.

This migration project also removed duplicated content, and provided the organization with a clean, secure and centralized source of truth for asset data and drawings.

Migrating our drawings, documents and processes into RedEye has really allowed us to more efficiently manage our treatment plants.”

– Jared Rodley, Electrical Technical Specialist

The Benefits

The launch of the new solution provided Urban Utilities with improved visibility of its network, in a way that could be easily and securely accessed by field crews and contractors – wherever they were working.

Today, standardized metadata tags improve automation when new drawings are loaded into the system. CAD tags are auto-populated as well, improving seamless integration with Urban Utilities’ other business applications, reducing load times and ensuring drawings are easily searchable.

Urban Utilities also used the launch of the new solution as an opportunity to introduce new templates, bringing in a standardized approach for working with different artifact types, building consistency into business workflows, regardless of who is working on a particular asset.

The organization manages four separate gas-producing facilities and complies with the Electrical Safety Act, amongst other legislation. Having all drawings and documents in one location simplifies this process.

Urban Utilities also reports that information is easier and quicker to find now that key content is online. Field teams and contractors can now complete work using the most recent version of engineering data and drawings from wherever they’re accessing the system. This improves the safety of work crews while continuing to build value into Urban Utilities’ asset data. As it continues to seek new ways of improving services to its customers, Urban Utilities is exploring other ways to expand its use of RedEye throughout the business.