Notify Improves SUEZ North America’s Emergency Notifications Process
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Timing is everything.
In 2016, I met with Shannon Decker, GIS Manager for the Mid-Atlantic Division of SUEZ Water North America, at the Esri Water Conference in Austin, Texas. SUEZ needed to shave off hours spent on a single emergency notification campaign to improve response time and decrease the inefficiencies inherent in their process. The company was just moving into cloud technology. Our Notify Software as a Service solution was in its initial year, and the only ArcGIS Online integrated notification solution available. The timing was perfect.
By implementing Portal for ArcGIS, SUEZ was ahead of other water companies. We immediately adapted Notify, which was built on the ArcGIS Online platform. In two months, we developed a Portal for ArcGIS supported version of Notify for the SUEZ deployment.
Within six months, we successfully implemented Notify across all 27 SUEZ North America business units. By leveraging Portal for ArcGIS, Notify has provided SUEZ with a common operating platform shared by both management and field staff, allowing for real-time collaboration. Outage, main break and water advisory area layers used by SUEZ no longer need to be recreated or downloaded and compared manually. Notify integrates the billing system contact information with critical utility GIS data and communications tools into a single interface.
“We can leverage existing water advisory areas from Portal for ArcGIS or create custom alert areas and send out high-speed phone, text and email notifications to thousands of customers within minutes.
Moving from a legacy, nonspatial system to Notify and leveraging Portal for ArcGIS was a game-changer. Our response time went from hours to minutes, from selecting streets and address ranges using drop-down lists to geographically identifying areas with pinpoint accuracy. Field staff can now use Survey 123 to create custom outage polygons while still on-site, which directly integrates with Notify.”
There is more to do for SUEZ, and Notify is evolving to meet their needs. SUEZ is implementing ArcGIS GeoEvent Server enterprisewide to leverage its real-time mapping and analytics capabilities. GeoDecisions’ extensive GeoEvent Server experience will allow us to seamlessly integrate it with Notify to automate specific notifications using machine learning algorithms. SUEZ also understands the benefits of using Notify for more than just emergency notifications. An expansion into billing and automatic customer service updates, as well as corporate security, is planned for the near future.
While partnering with SUEZ, we are continuously pushing the boundaries of innovation to help automate and streamline their operations.
For more information on Notify please contact info@geodecisions.com or visit Products page for more information.
