Accelerating water asset planning for Sydney’s future growth

Congratulations to Andrew Foddy, GHD Digital’s Geographic Information System Consultant, who has been awarded GHD’s annual Chair’s Award for Technical Excellence.

Andrew was recognised for his work with Sydney Water and team members from Aurecon and Arup. It is often the case that multiple suppliers will work together on the optimum solution for a client, such as Sydney Water.

The team developed a geospatial water planning tool, an online web-mapping application that automates scenario planning, integrates product thinking, and overlays a user’s selected data onto maps. This in turn helps enable optimum growth modelling to produce baseline integrated water servicing concepts, growth forecasts, system generation, asset sizing, and cost estimation.

Andrew shared that, “the power of a little bit of data and a few spatial transformations,” has revolutionised Sydney Water’s modelling for growth scenarios across the Greater Sydney region.

Using a specialised form of ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) software, the geospatial tool extracts data from Sydney Water’s wastewater, potable water, recycled water and stormwater utilities, transforms the data into a usable format and loads it into a single ‘data warehouse’ for reporting and analysis.

It provides the user with models of different growth scenarios in 2-10 minutes (accelerating a planning process that normally takes two weeks to do manually) through a intuitive, interactive interface. Sydney Water has found the visual outputs helpful, especially when discussing potential plans with stakeholders.

Suhanti Thirunavukarasu, Senior Planner, System & Asset Planning at Sydney Water commented, “I observed that Andrew was able to collaborate with a range of folks from different disciplines and co-create the logic and thinking in the tool. The GHD team was small but they worked with a great deal of creativity and agility; [and] they were very open and able to respond to whatever challenge we put in front of them and find a way through. It was a joy to work with the guys and I was often surprised at how quickly we’d see aspects of the tool taking form, going from inception to a working model in the Feature Manipulation Engine.”

Through the tool, Sydney Water has already achieved substantial time and cost savings and benefited from the power of a more collaborative approach to planning liveable and sustainable communities.

Commenting on Andrew’s success, Rob Knott, GHD’s Chair, acknowledged the demonstration of technical excellence.

“At GHD we have the capability and innovation credibility to build new ways of operating, even with our biggest and ‘smartest’ clients. It is a true testament to our people who are continually reinventing how we provide services to create lasting community benefit,” said Rob Knott, GHD’s Chair.

“Andrew’s solution has helped realise a goal that will help our client create a more sustainable future for local residents.”