"The Award of Excellence is going to an organization that has demonstrated strategic spatial thinking from the start," said Mr. Miller. "By staying true to their vision, they were able to incorporate their hydro, wastewater, and municipal networks to create a seamless, single platform architecture to truly improve workflow efficiencies."

"We are honoured to be in receipt of ESRI Canada's Award of Excellence," said Helen McLaren, Director, Information Technology Services, The Municipality of Chatham-Kent. "We stayed true to our vision and now we have unified our information systems and streamlined our business processes."

The Municipality of Chatham-Kent is a single-tier municipal government located in Southwestern Ontario. It has a population of 110,000 and a geographic extent of 2500 square kilometres. Chatham-Kent and its affiliate companies, Chatham-Kent Hydro Inc. and the Chatham-Kent Public Utilities Commission, supply and distribute electricity, water, and wastewater services to over 40,000 customer accounts.

Since the amalgamation of Chatham-Kent in 1998, the municipality has concentrated on centralizing and streamlining its business systems to the benefit of its employees and its rate payers. Soon after amalgamation, Chatham-Kent's administration developed a GIS strategic plan to formally address a number of business concerns including the organizing and conversion of information from multiple municipalities into one centralized database.

With the help of a spatial database (ArcSDE) and ArcIMS, Chatham-Kent's administration soon began to notice measurable benefits. Business units such as planning, building, taxation, and emergency dispatch, now rely on the efficiencies that the enterprise GIS platform provides. The municipality also found that they had access to much higher quality data and a greatly improved method for sending out property notifications to area residents informing them about upcoming construction projects.

"Looking forward, this platform will help us move towards other goals which include integrating our key corporate systems such as Smart Meters, SCADA, and our modeling software," said David Kenney, President of Chatham-Kent Hydro Inc."

Building upon the success of the ArcGIS enterprise implementation, Chatham-Kent Hydro and the Chatham-Kent Public Utilities Commission selected Miner & Miner's ArcFM solution to manage their networks. The Municipality of Chatham-Kent and the associated business units now have a robust data management environment; common access to centralized data, advanced spatial query, analysis, and display, and integration with their Customer Information Systems (CIS).

"As a Municipality we have been leading the way since we started back in 1998 and we feel that this new ESRI initiative has continued to allow us to lead the way in this ever evolving new field," said Scott Praill, General Manager, Chatham-Kent Public Utilities Commission.

About ESRI Canada:
Established in 1984, ESRI Canada is a Canadian owned company specializing in geographic information systems (GIS) solutions. We distribute the world's leading GIS software solutions from ESRI Inc., Miner and Miner, and Azteca. In order to provide organizations with complete industry-specific solutions we have established an extensive business partner program that includes more than 125 Canadian organizations. ESRI Canada also provides professional services including consulting, training, technical support, and enterprise GIS implementation. We are leaders in providing world-class enterprise GIS solutions for many industries including local government, utilities, public safety and defence, business demographics, education, natural resources, and transportation. ESRI Canada has thirteen regional offices across the country, with headquarters in Toronto, Ontario. For more information, please visit http://www.esricanada.com/ or call 1-800-447-9778.

Media Contacts:

John Waite
GIS Marketing Specialist
ESRI Canada
T: 416-386-6463
E: jwaite@esricanada.com
W: http://www.esricanada.com/
 
Catherine Fitzgerald
Manager, Corporate Applications
The Municipality of Chatham-Kent
T: 519-360-1998 Ext. 3743