Santa Margarita Water District

The Santa Margarita Water District (SMWD) recognized a need to update their manual, paper-based workflow for customer notifications of water outages, repair details, and related issues. In response, EBA used Esri’s Experience Builder (ExB) application, hosted in SMWD’s ArcGIS Portal environment, to configure a streamlined customer notification (CN) web application. Using Twilio’s notification services, the application sends an email, text, and/or voice mail to customers selected by SMWD staff through a custom widget. The widget enables SMWD staff to filter and choose customers by account type, a freeform polygon drawn in a web map, or a predefined area such as a homeowner’s association. Selected customer information can then be viewed on the web map, exported to a CSV format with affected fire hydrant locations, or distributed by one of the notification methods listed above.

EBA also configured a Python script that runs weekly to update SMWD’s customer location attribute information. This update gives users access to the most recent contact information to send notifications through the application.

Along with preparing administrative documentation to help SMWD’s GIS team transition to the application, EBA now provides monthly support services to troubleshoot issues and make updates, as needed. Because the monthly cost of notifications (email, text, and phone) is calculated with no markup, SMWD has realized cost savings over other notification services.