About the Town of Orleans Water Department
Situated on the ‘inner elbow’ of Cape Cod, the town of Orleans’ water department manages water quality and wastewater treatment for around 5.8K customers. Groundwater is supplied through 8 wells and the town has a state of the art water treatment plant with ultrafiltration membranes. Using these resources, the department maintains high quality municipal water supply, ensuring sufficient water to meet the needs of all its customers, even on the most demanding days of summer.
6
Population102
of water main2
water storage reservoirs939
hydrantsChallenge
After building its six million-dollar treatment plant, the town of Orleans was looking for an asset management solution to support its infrastructure. Soon, staff began to realise that much of the knowledge they had built up was not documented effectively and would be lost when employees hit retirement.
Read moreChallenge
Nothing beats experience. But what happens when the people with that experience retire and take vast amounts of institutional knowledge with them? That was the challenge facing Assistant Superintendent, Sue Brown, when she decided it was time to capture staff expertise at the Orleans (MA) Water Department.
“We started using AMCS Field Services to begin putting information into a central location where everyone could access it,” she explained. “Essentially, we wanted to store the information that was in our heads within AMCS Field Services because when our senior people retire, that information will be lost.
“For me, the killer feature was the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) reporting. That's my main job and nobody else in the department knew how to do it. I really needed to get that process automated so that anybody could do it in case anything ever happened to me.”
Solution
In the quest to preserve the team’s knowledge, Assistant Superintendent, Sue Brown, turned to AMCS Field Services, a unique asset management solution designed specifically for utilities. Now, information for all water customers is documented, along with work orders and maintenance information for water mains, hydrants, valves, and gate valves.
Read moreSolution
The town of Orleans has been able to record and preserve all kinds of information and diverse expertise within AMCS Field Services. “We have all our water customers on there with drawings and pictures,” Sue revealed. “We do work orders through it for things like seasonal turn-offs and turn-ons.
“I have manuals on there for products and for assets so that my employees can go to the assets and grab a manual and troubleshoot, if they need to, or look up parts. Part numbers are stored along with where to buy things. I even have how-to videos so they can see how to change a pH probe, for example. AMCS Field Services does quite a lot.”
Results
By documenting knowledge and eliminating paper-based and manual processes, AMCS Field Services has helped Orleans’ water department generate huge time savings. Now staff can make every minute count when working in the field and keep track of asset activities without generating piles of paper.
Read moreResults
With streamlined work scheduling and enhanced reporting, AMCS Field Services greatly simplifies asset management, boosting team productivity and delivering significant time savings.
“AMCS Field Services helps us save time,” Sue said. “For example, we exercise the gate valves every year to make sure they're working. Before we'd send the crews out with maps of where the gates were, and they'd just start turning, but we’d miss a lot that way and have duplication because teams wouldn’t know where another crew began or left off.
“Now the crews can see in real-time which ones have been done and which ones haven't, so we're not missing any and not doing any of them more than once. AMCS Field Services simplifies the work, eliminates that duplication, and this way you have a record of it, too.”
Move Beyond Templates with Tailored Functionality
Automating the reporting process was a key advantage for the Town of Orleans water department, when staff discovered that some expertise was held by just one individual. Now reports for the Department of Environmental Protection are easy to collate, taking just minutes, instead of hours. Moreover, staff were able to intuitively create tailored reports, with no need for a developer: “AMCS Field Services isn’t a cookie cutter solution. Many of the features, I created myself and now everyone can use them.”
After the building of our six-million-dollar treatment plant here in Orleans, I spent years looking for and testing asset management and preventative maintenance software in order to be proactive rather than reactive with its upkeep. I fell upon AMCS Field Services at a DEP training session and found what I had been looking for and so much more. The possibilities for what AMCS Field Services can accomplish seem endless.
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Discover how the town of Orleans water department was able to save time, boost productivity and document institutional knowledge using AMCS Field Services.
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