Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 22 | Page 57

CASE STUDY A s one of the largest metros in South Africa, the City of Cape Town is tasked with providing an annual average of around 880 million litres of clean, safe drinking water daily to residents, businesses and industry, as well as effectively collecting and treating wastewater from the city. This requires world-class management of water catchment areas and appropriate storage and treatment of wastewater to ensure a healthy and safe community for all residents. “Water and sanitation services provide people with dignity and the provision of these services at all levels remains a challenge,” said Peter Flower, Director Water and Sanitation for the City of Cape Town. “Cape Town is a growing city, there is a consequential growth in the demand for water. We have aging infrastructure (some of our dams and pipelines are more than a century old), and recently, the impact of the severe drought conditions. “Mobility is one of the strategic initiatives of the department to help in addressing these challenges and will go a long way towards ensuring both infrastructure and financial sustainability.” To support its water and sanitation efforts, the City of Cape Town implemented a comprehensive mobile solution for the automation of asset management and field service processes. According to Mehmood Khan, Chief Operations Officer at SAP Africa, the rise of smart cities is driving change in the public sector to improve the citizen experience. “In this era of connected citizens, local government institutions are increasingly looking for ways to improve service delivery and better engage with citizens,” he said. SAP Work Manager empowers the City of Cape Town’s workforce with digital tools to more efficiently install, inspect, maintain and repair water and sanitation assets. The technology enables workers to access, complete and manage their assigned work orders and service requests via their mobile devices. The mobile application is a key building block of the asset management master plan. “At the same time, a need to minimise operational expenditure by reducing maintenance costs associated with key infrastructure assets is driving the adoption of next-generation digital tools and making a positive impact in society.” Mobility is enabling the city’s skilled maintenance teams to perform their work more efficiently and effectively and is providing it with near real-time information that is analysed to improve future decision-making. • The Water Engineering Maintainer Application (WEMA) designed for artisans or ‘maintainers’ to receive, execute and manage maintenance work orders through a mobile device, supporting greater team efficiencies • The Water Engineering Supervisor Application (WEZA) is designed for superintendents to manage the allocation, release and review of team work orders • The CityReads Meter Reading Application is designed to digitally capture meter readings in-house and in real-time • The DisconnectReconnect Application is designed to manage the capturing of field information by the technician for disconnection and reconnection of work orders IN THIS ERA OF CONNECTED CITIZENS, LOCAL GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONS ARE INCREASINGLY LOOKING FOR WAYS TO IMPROVE SERVICE DELIVERY AND BETTER ENGAGE WITH CITIZENS. The key benefits of SAP Work Manager include increasing first-time resolution rates and improve workforce safety and productivity to effectively install, maintain, inspect and repair mission-critical asset. It also prolongs the life of assets with guided work flows and timely processing www.intelligentcio.com of work orders, notification and asset master data, whether online of offline. SAP Work Manager is deployed on premise and system and software requirements vary by specific customer scenarios. For example, SAP Work Manager, cloud edition is deployed in the cloud and available as software as a service (SaaS). The City of Cape Town uses SAP Work Manager mobile applications to support several key function areas: The City of Cape Town is also adding further applications to its SAP Work Manager solution. “We are also excited about the recent implementation of the Reactive Issues Management Application (RIMA), which drastically improves the speed with which INTELLIGENTCIO 57