Enterprise GIS Platform Support, Modernization, and Application Maintenance

With GIS as a core component of operations, the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) faced a major challenge in 2018: upgrading their GIS Enterprise and modernizing core web applications used daily by thousands of users. Their top priority was Engineering Records Viewer (ERV), a single server application built on outdated and unsupported technology, but used daily as the central receiving point of engineering records.

EBA worked with PWD to deploy a highly available ArcGIS Enterprise system to serve as their new central GIS. In addition to the Enterprise architecture, design, and deployment, EBA migrated production resources into the continuously accessible live system.

By concurrently redesigning the ERV application into Esri’s Experience Builder (ExB) architecture, EBA enabled PWD to avoid the high cost of a fully tailored application while still providing both base functionality and future growth capabilities. Today, PWD staff uses the new ExB widget exclusively to access engineering records systemwide.

EBA has also led PWD through several ArcGIS version upgrades and complicated IT server migrations to a new active directory domain. We continue to support the Enterprise GIS system and recently completed the migration of PWD’s water and raw water data to the Esri Utility Network (UN) data model. EBA developed an automated workflow process to give PWD staff ongoing access to existing processes and applications, along with UN data model benefits and associated web tracing functionality.

Additionally, EBA implemented Esri’s ArcGIS Monitor to give GIS staff access to the system’s health, usage, and performance in real time—an invaluable tool for troubleshooting network issues and identifying problems before they become more serious concerns.