Positional Accuracy Improvement at Yorkshire Water completed in 13 days

10 August 2007

Improving positional accuracy of Yorkshire Water’s (YW) GIS presented a significant challenge for the Company as two thirds of the 18,000 OS map tiles were affected.

Yorkshire Water’s PAI Project team examined approaches taken by other utilities, and initially concluded that a manual correction programme was the best way to meet their quality expectations. Forecasting a two year programme involving 7 staff, a business plan was submitted to the YW board, who not only rejected the plan, but set ambitious time and quality objectives back to the team.

Analysing pros and cons of different options YW commissioned Innogistic to pilot an automated approach based on the Company’s GeoFix tool. The pilot confirmed the feasibility of an automated solution, and following the development of further quality assurance tools, was run operationally.

The results were impressive: of the 7 million assets in the database, following transformation, less 1% of features were flagged by the quality assurance system as requiring a further manual check. Of those, only 2400, out of a total of 7 million assets required any further correction.

“The success of the PAI programme at Yorkshire Water has been unprecedented” comments Mike Turner, YW Head of Asset Information, adding that to process and QA all the data only took 13 days!