Carson City Public Works

Background

Carson City, Nevada − In 1859, Carson City, Nevada drew hundreds of prospectors with the news of the rich silver strike known as the Comstock Lode. Originally serving as a stopover for pioneers traveling to California, Carson City quickly became a place for others to seek their fortunes in the silver mines of the city’s local mountains. Today, Carson City continues to draw residents and visitors alike who are drawn to the year-round sports offered by the local Sierra Nevada Mountains, the excitement of hitting it rich with “Lady Luck” at the casinos, or to simply live in a community which still offers a “small town” atmosphere.

Carson City Public Works Keeping a City “Humming” Year-Round

Since 1992, Carson City Public Works has used the AVEVA SCADA Software Solution to manage both water purification and wastewater recycling facilities. Featuring the award-winning AVEVA InTouch HMI, the department is able to quickly create standardized, reusable visualization applications and easily deploy them across its entire enterprise.

As the demand on public works escalated in recent years and staff mobility became increasingly important, the City realized that it was necessary to expand the department’s ability to remotely monitor and manage services across the area’s three counties. To successfully integrate its remote operations management systems, the Public Works department implemented the AVEVA mobile reporting application with Insight.

“To effectively and efficiently perform our duties each day, we’ve developed a highly intuitive infrastructure based on ‘smart city’ technology from AVEVA.” —Darren Schulz, Deputy Public Works Director.

These automated infrastructure management applications run on AVEVA System Platform to effectively control a broad range of the City’s municipal services including water and wastewater, traffic control, service truck fleets, landfill processes, and renewable energy production. Implementing the latest remote management technology from AVEVA enables the Public Works team to deliver affordable services to both citizens and visitors.

“With a staff of over 120 people, the Carson City Public Works Department is often called on to assist the public in many different ways and many of our duties go on around the clock,” says Darren Schulz, Carson City’s deputy Public Works director. “To effectively and efficiently perform our duties each day, we’ve developed a highly intuitive infrastructure based on ‘smart city’ technology from AVEVA.”

Carson City use iPads and smart phones to their advantage. These advanced virtualization and communication devices increase the efficiency of the department’s operators and management teams enabling them to achieve a high level of operational readiness.

Access Critical KPI Data in the Field

The AVEVA Insight solution enhances the mobility of the City’s staff and provides them with data in a format that can be easily read and manipulated using their smart phone screen navigation features. This innovative mobile application enables the City’s public works staff to instantly access key performance indicators (KPIs) and critical process information from AVEVA Historian and other data sources right on their phones.

With Insight, data reports are sent to team members’ smartphones and reports are updated automatically. The ease of access to critical public works’ information is unprecedented, enabling team members to immediately access and share reports amongst themselves when needed in a cost effective and secure manner.

Improved Situational Awareness and Operational Readiness

The power of Insight allows Carson City staff to make more informed decisions based on real-time information while in the field. With the ability to access multiple reports and compare data, team members can quickly pinpoint problems at any of the City’s public works locations. The solution enables any team member to send reports or data graphs from AVEVA Historian or other data sources via e-mail to each other to initiate immediate action to address issues.

By viewing critical KPIs and reports generated by AVEVA Historian in the field, the AVEVA solution enables staff to more effectively monitor and manage the operational performance of the City’s municipal services. These capabilities have significantly increased the staff’s overall situational awareness enabling it to achieve a high level of operational readiness on a regular basis.

“The ability for our engineers and operators to use the iPad and smart phones for controlling city services has greatly increased situational awareness and allowed us to become more efficient by making sure that our people are always on the move,” Schulz said. “Insight has enabled our senior staff with instant access to key performance indicators and critical process information right on their iPads and phones.”

The AVEVA solution enables staff to more effectively monitor and manage the operational performance of the City’s municipal services.

“By combining the strength and knowledge of multiple work groups and sharing individual skills and equipment, the Carson City Public Works team can provide the community with the highest quality of customer service,” Shulz said.

Leveraging the latest in mobile visualization technology – Carson City uses iPads and smart phones to their advantage.

These advanced virtualization and communication devices increase the efficiency of the department’s operators and management teams enabling them to achieve a high level of operational readiness.

“The virtual machines that we’ve implemented here in Carson City have allowed us to reduce the burden of administration and overhead costs while significantly increasing our reliability and disaster recovery processes,” said James Jacklett, electrical/signal supervisor at Carson City Public Works. “Integration with AVEVA has enabled real-time status, alarm notification, and historization of the state of communications for effective monitoring of the City’s transportation, power and water systems, providing us with better operational readiness.”

From management of the City’s solar plants that provide up to 748,000 KWH of clean power each year, to delivering more than 22 million gallons of water while processing 6.9 millions of gallons of wastewater each day, to maintaining the traffic light and transportation systems of three counties, AVEVA has enabled the Carson City Public Works department to increase the reliability and efficiency of the services they offer.

The activities of the Public Works Department touch the lives of Carson City residents and visitors on a daily basis.

With the implementation of AVEVA solutions, Carson City has achieved a 15 percent reduction in “manhours,” was able to reduce its work week from five, eight-hour days to four,10- hour days, and lowered overhead costs. These time and cost reductions equate to more time department personnel can dedicate to developing innovative programs to better serve the citizens and visitors to Carson City.

With help from AVEVA and its Ecosystem partner Industrial Software Solutions, Carson City Public Works has created a “smarter” Carson City with innovative tools, capabilities and solutions that leverage advanced mobile communications and data management technologies to carry it into the future.