Western Downs Regional Council

X-Info DBYD protects Western Downs Regional Council’s assets

Southern Queensland is fast becoming the next major energy hub for Australia. Leading the development in the region are the multi-billion dollar Coal Seam Gas (CSG) projects throughout the Surat Basin serving the gas refineries currently under construction on Curtis Island for international export.

With so much development occurring in the region, the team at Western Downs Regional Council (WDRC) understood the benefits of the national 1100 service in protecting their gas, water and sewer assets. Utilities Manager, Tim Low states “Due to staff shortages and huge workloads the only way to become part of DBYD was to have a system that was completely automated and required no human intervention.

In October 2012 the Australian Dial Before You Dig implementation was undertaken to define WDRC’s available data, business rules and response requirements. Tim recalls “I was impressed with the demonstration yet slightly sceptical because I see many software programs that promise the world in the demo but fail to deliver on implementation”.

One month later the system was automatically processing over 20 requests per week without human intervention. “Customers get the information they require without staff having to be involved, allowing staff to concentrate on other tasks”, said Tim.

The Mipela GeoSolutions hosted X-Info DBYD solution has meant that WDRC has been able to register with the Dial Before You Dig ‘1100’ call centre without needing additional resources or IT infrastructure.

The detailed implementation project has ensured that key WDRC business and asset management policies are adhered to when replying to the public. The automated responses contain WDRC legally approved “Duty of Care” statements within the corporately styled templates.

Tim says “The most challenging part of the implementation was setting aside the time for the online conferences to set the scope of works. Mipela were very efficient in this regards and all up the setup took about 3 hours over several sessions. Mipela listened to what council wanted to achieve out of the system and developed the system to suit our needs, they didn’t try to get council into a one size fits all system.

WDRC assets are well managed within their local GIS. Tools have been put in place to support the upload of revised layers to the Mipela GeoSolutions hosted site on demand. The WDRC GIS team can easily control the currency of the information on the outgoing responses.

WDRC’s quality of output templates, certainty in applied business rules and accuracy of spatial information has ensured confidence in the automated X-Info DBYD process negating the need for manual intervention.

If you would like to know how X-Info DBYD can be applied in your workplace, please contact Mipela GeoSolutions on 1300 807 770