Niagara Infrastructure Database Integration

The Region of Niagara, which formerly maintained its water and wastewater data inventory in single-use data files, needed a more secure and robust corporate data warehouse to streamline its operations.  The Region retained Hatch Mott MacDonald to design and implement a complex infrastructure database with multi-user maintenance capabilities, as well as to provide integration methodology to support the CMMS (Datastream) Hydraulic Modeling, and Financial/Capital Management systems.

As part of this project, HMM migrated the Region’s existing inventory data, providing validation and correction as part of that process. The end result was a “modeled” infrastructure database, corrected and loaded data for water and wastewater. Integration support for key systems was also provided. This project has positioned the Region of Niagara to address operational requirements as well as specific Asset Reporting requirements, enabling them to use the inventory in support of asset valuation and full cost reporting.

Project Highlights:

• Infrastructure Data Warehouse – One source for all water and sewer information, scalable to support growth and the potential for lower tier municipality data integration.
• Systems Integration – Enables users from various groups to utilize any or all of the database through their own specific applications, benefiting from the managed inventory and allowing them to add value to their information.
• Sustainable Information – The data warehouse was designed to be flexible and provide the Region with the ability to further evolve the structure, content, and level of integration and interoperability, allowing the Region with the flexibility to further identify their immediate and long term needs and to effectively prioritize them.
• Broader Accessibility –Data is now managed in a multi-user database environment that serves users through numerous applications and interfaces (desktop and web) for uses that range from simple and casual data viewing to engineering analysis and day to day maintenance and administration.
• Asset Management – The underlying goal of this project was to provide a robust foundation of data that could support the Regions asset management goals.