Maximizing Yarra Valley Water's Asset Data Access and Efficiency

Overview

Yarra Valley Water is the largest of three Victorian Government owned retail water corporations. Covering a vast 4,000 square kilometers (1,544 square miles), their network includes over 20,000 kilometers (12,427 miles) of water and sewer mains, about 100 water pump stations, 10 major treatment plans, and many small assets.

Managing nearly $6 billion in assets, Yarra Valley Water delivers essential water and sewage services to two million residents and nearly 60,000 businesses across Melbourne.

Faced with an outdated drawing management system that was no longer able to keep up with the demands of working with native CAD files, Yarra Valley Water embarked on a digital transformation.

This initiative aimed to modernize the management of their as-built drawings and specifications, ensuring the reliability and sustainability of their critical infrastructure. Through these efforts, Yarra Valley Water continues to support Melbourne’s growth and deliver top-notch services to the community.

Key Takeaways

• Centralizing asset drawings and data can free up expert resources and reduce search time for engineering drawings across an organization.
• System-based workflows depersonalize the drafting process so that the most effective methods of working can be applied, enforced and duplicated at scale.
• Standardizing drawings for like assets can generate substantial cost savings in design work and improve operational efficiencies.

If we get the design right the first time, we’re going to save a lot of projects and adjustments going forward. We’re using RedEye as part of our toolkit to improve the quality of what we’re checking, and what we’re designing."

-Kenneth Thompson, Integration Services Specialist, Yarra Valley Water

Challenges

Historically, Yarra Valley Water’s in-house design team handled most of the drafting and design work. However, with the shift to an outsourced design process, the company needed to adapt its processes accordingly.

Yarra Valley Water’s legacy drawing management system couldn’t keep pace with advancements in CAD technologies within the native files provided by contractors, and therefore was relying mainly on PDFs. Employees managed and distributed copies of these PDFs, leading to the loss of many native files on individual hard drives across the company.

This process posed multiple risks, particularly the long-term financial impact on future projects. Essentially, they were “doubling up” on drafting costs, having to redraft PDFs into CAD files for new projects.

Additionally, this approach was problematic due to security and compliance risks, and it made finding up-to-date drawings difficult for everyone who needed them.

As Yarra Valley Water transitioned from PDFs to CAD files, they required a new solution capable of handling native files and various file formats. This solution needed to remain relevant as engineering technologies and industry standards evolved.

Solution

Yarra Valley Water chose Accruent’s RedEye to become the single source of truth for its engineering drawings and data. The focus of the initial implementation project was to improve electrical compliance, with a view to extending RedEye to other use cases across the business.

A dedicated project team and input from Yarra Valley Water’s key stakeholders resulted in a successful implementation, which began with over 400,000 drawings. About 5% were eliminated through the deduplication process.

Now more than one third of the organization uses RedEye, with a combined 7,000 document searches and 300 document markups every month.

We’re using RedEye to change the processes in the business, which will drive better quality from our suppliers. Our electrical quality on projects is noticeably better than what it was two or three years ago."

 

-Kenneth Thompson, Integration Services Specialist, Yarra Valley Water

The Benefits

One of the immediate benefits RedEye delivered was significantly enhancing the ease and speed of finding engineering drawings. With enhanced metadata for each drawing and a flexible keyword search feature, head office staff, field crews, and contractors can quickly locate the necessary drawings via their desktops or the RedEye mobile app. Yarra Valley Water reports that the search time for key asset data and documents has been reduced from hours to just a few clicks.

Additionally, RedEye has helped decentralize information management from a single department. This change allows staff from any department to contribute to the management of key asset data, fostering a more collaborative and efficient work environment.

We know there are potential savings of at least $2,500,000 in design work alone."

Enforcing quality standards for contractors

Having RedEye in place has also helped Yarra Valley Water transfer control of the intellectual property of its drawings back from contractors, while also improving the quality of the outputs supplied by contractors.

“Prior to using RedEye, we didn’t have a drawing standard, or a document that outlined how we expected to receive drawings from our contractors. It was often left to the end of the project for us to request accurate up-to-date, as-built drawings - and they were typically much harder to get at the end of the project,” said Mr Thompson.

“Now, we have a drawing standard which is published on our website. When organizations quote for work, we state up front what we expect of them in terms of supplying drawings to us. This has been a major shift in the way we engage with our contractors, and RedEye has been instrumental in helping us to enforce higher level quality standards.”

The savings potential of standardized drawings

One of the biggest opportunities Yarra Valley Water is now exploring as a result of using RedEye, is the cost savings it could make by creating standard drawings of assets such as its sewer and water stations.

An integrator working for the water provider recently reported that by not having standard drawings for its pumps, it was costing many thousands of dollars in extra design, rework and refit work for each site.

“We have over 250 sewer and water sites. Using standard drawings and appropriate processes, has the potential for us to make substantial savings over the long term” said Mr Thompson.

RedEye has been instrumental in helping us to enforce higher level quality standards."

Looking ahead

Yarra Valley Water continues to refine and extend its use of RedEye. The solution is driving cultural change through the organization, by enabling conversations with suppliers around quality of work, and also procedural and workflow processes amongst its own staff. Continued discussions with Accruent and its partners highlight opportunities to make additional cost savings.

RedEye really helps us to understand and demonstrate the value of our asset drawings and data, and is providing a strong foundation for our future digital initiatives."

-Kenneth Thompson, Integration Services Specialist, Yarra Valley Water