Digital Design
By Pam Broviak, City Engineer/Assistant Director of Public Works at City of Geneva, Illinois.
When my past employer, the city of LaSalle, installed an automatic meter reading (AMR) system, I was excited about the technology and looked forward to improving the efficiency of our meter reading and water billing system. Some of the benefits included tracking and notifications to staff of customer leaks, immediate final reads, high/low water usage, and tampering alerts. Yet, as an engineer, I also planned on using the data for designing, monitoring, and operating our water system.
My vision had been to link the data to a digital map created from our GIS where dots represented meters. Colors and other indicators would tell us of real-time reads, flows, pressures, and all that good stuff allowing a visualization of how our system was functioning using real-time actual data. Unfortunately, once I saw the software and asked about the ability to extract data from the database, not only did the vendors seem surprised anyone would even want this information, they made it clear their system was designed for billing only. If we wanted to do anything more with the data, we would have to hire our own programmer and create our own setup.