Migration at WML Limburgs Drinkwater

WML is the water company for the Province of Limburg in the very southern part of The Netherlands, bordering both Germany and Belgium. Together, around 400 WML employees make sure that the company provides drinking water to about 1.1 million people, operating a network with a length of approximately 8.800 km.

The need

WML has developed a new GIS vision based on insights from both inside and outside its own organisation. This vision focuses on the following challenges:

• The current version of WML’s GIS application – Smallworld NRM Water - is out of support and continuing to use this application would require an extensive upgrade. 
• The current set of diverse GIS applications provides no support for registration of assets outside the water domain and interaction with other domains, while there is a clear need for WML to do so. 
• In the current IT landscape network data sets are replicated to serve different GIS applications. Synchronization between the data sets and applications are in place, but are not able to provide a common operational picture that is up-to-date within the desired time frames.

The goals

The implementation project was defined around a number of goals as part of the GIS vision:

• Transition from digital drawing to fully unleashing integrated GIS capabilities. 
• Rationalization and standardization of the IT landscape. The company aims to decrease the time-to-market for new functionality in the GIS landscape.
• Removing data silos: provide one single source of truth used for providing insights from network data that should always be up-to-date.

The result

Adhering to the NDWM data model allows the organization to more efficiently cooperate with other (utility) companies since it provides data through web services instead of relying on data exports used before as well as describing assets in a similar structure as neighboring water utilities.