A metropolitan local government authority the City of Canada Bay is situated in the Inner West of Sydney, NSW. Formed in December 2000 following the merger of Concord and Drummoyne Councils, it owns and manages not only the region’s stormwater drainage assets but also a growing private underground electrical network.
In 2000 the City of Canada Bay became a member of the national DBYD service, utilising its administration staff to manually handle enquiries via a 3-stage process. This involved individually reviewing each enquiry, creating maps via templates and returning PDF documents to those requesting asset information.
Brian Woolley, Council Engineer at the City of Canada Bay explains that “after running this process for just over a year it was becoming a drain on resources to keep up with the workload and DBYD enquiry numbers increased by 40% per annum during that time.”
Brian went on to say “As a council we were actively submitting enquiries via DBYD prior to commencing our own internal works and early on the team noticed we would receive responses from the likes of Sydney Water within a minute. This drove us to seek how they were achieving this which led us to PelicanCorp.”
With enquiry numbers rising as City of Canada Bay continued to increase its underground electrical network, Council realised it needed to automate the process to better protect the assets and those working around them.
“The region’s electrical utilities were handing maintenance of the public lighting network back to Council, so as City of Canada Bay began owning some street lights as a private network we had an even greater need to protect those working around the more dangerous underground electrical assets,” said Brian.
Whilst majority of City of Canada Bay’s power is still owned by the utilities, whenever Council constructs new community spaces, such as parks or shopping centres, it installs privately owned council lighting to beautify the area placing the networks of these assets underground.
In addition to power, stormwater and drainage, City of Canada Bay has also implemented a multi-million-dollar reticulated stormwater reuse system that has kilometres of pressure pipe feeding community spaces including golf courses and parks with water for irrigation. This has added another asset layer into the process and is included in the TicketAccess automated system.
“Protecting our assets is critical to the City of Canada Bay. By reducing the overheads on efforts to run the system it enabled Council to re-allocate resources. TicketAccess operates very well in the background with little-to-no attention required,” said Brian.
City of Canada Bay made a big step forward with PelicanCorp’s TicketAccess in 2010, however with improvements there are now additional steps that can be made to further improve automation.
Brian summarised that “the City of Canada Bay is proud of the steps it took to protect its assets and community by providing quicker responses to DBYD enquiries via automation, however we are always looking for new ways to use technology including the possibilities offered by the TicketAccess hosted and managed service from PelicanCorp”.
*Copy supplied by Pelican Corp
