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Melbourne Water UDS Platform

Project Background

Melbourne Water manages and protects Melbourne’s major water resources, which in turn makes the city a fantastic place to live. They manage water supply catchments, supplying affordable and high-quality drinking and recycled water. In addition, they remove and treat most of Melbourne’s sewage and provide integrated drainage and flood management services.

ARQ Group has been working with Melbourne Water to build a digital strategy that leverages modern cloud technology to deliver reliable provisioning of essential water services for Victorians. Through leveraging our own experience and the global perspectives of AWS and Snowflake we have been able to add extended value to the strategic use of technology at Melbourne Water whilst simultaneously reducing risk through mutual investment in assured success. 

Challenge

With an expansion in IT, OT and IoT solutions across their business, Melbourne Water had an ever-increasing set of data which they weren’t able to easily access or draw accurate insights from. This was hindering the organisation from achieving their digital goals, especially the delivery of the Intelligent Network and efficient and holistic data sharing with customers.

To achieve their digital goals, Melbourne Water needed to move to a highly integrated and automated future state that is simple-to-use for their customers and employees. The first step of this journey required a solid foundation platform that enables data integration, data validation, data storage and management, data analytics and IOT device management.

Solution

ARQ Group worked with Melbourne Water through a six-week discovery process to design a scalable, state-of-the-art Date Lake and Analytics platform called UDS (Unified Data Store).

The foundation architecture housed on Melbourne Water’s AWS Cloud was delivered over the ensuing six months. The platform employs best-of-breed tools such as AWS Glue for data ingestion into the Snowflake cloud database platform, dbt Core for data transformation, and delivers data to consumers via Snowflake to range of SQL-compliant reporting, advanced analytics and AI/ML workbenches. The combination of Snowflake and AWS has allowed for the rapid realisation of a mature technology footprint that could otherwise take years to establish.  Encompassing real time governance, security controls, and adaptable measures of data quality and accuracy, the platform delivers a key business objective of building trust in data and transforming Melbourne Water to become a data driven enterprise. 

In subsequent phases ARQ will build out the platform to future-state, encompassing real time streaming, unstructured data consumption, and advanced analytics workspaces.

Benefits

The UDS platform ARQ has delivered for Melbourne Water has enabled them to begin their Intelligent Network Enablement journey without a monolithic investment in data, allowing them to focus on incremental improvements. The platform has helped Melbourne Water to overcome historic constraints in operational resilience, disaster recovery and business continuity of their technology assets and accelerate key outcomes such as critical water utility asset management and predictive machine maintenance. 

Furthermore, we’ve shortened Melbourne Water’s infrastructure provisioning cycle from months to hours, which hasresulted in accelerated experimentation and bias to action. Thus, enabling Melbourne Water to learn through hands-on experience rather than remaining constrained by protracted theoretical analysis and abstracted decision making.  This ability has further enabled Melbourne Water to take a business centric view of their technology direction and capabilities,rather than remaining vendor led and infrastructure focused in their roadmaps. 

In addition, we’ve simplified access to reliable and comprehensive data which has resulted in a significant uplift in staff efficiency and satisfaction as they undertake innovative use cases around real time water utility asset management, Digital Twins for the operation of critical infrastructure, as well as geospatial scenario modelling for the potential impact of natural disasters such as flood and drought events. 

As the data platform matures it will further enable inter-agency collaboration with Melbourne Water’s peers in both water utilities as well as essential services and emergency services for coordinated community health and pandemic response. 

About Melbourne Water

Melbourne Water is owned by the Victorian Government. They manage the major water, sewerage and drainage networks across Greater Melbourne, together with local water companies and councils. They care for 25,000km of rivers and creeks that sustain healthy communities and the environment – making the region a great place to live.

About ARQ

ARQ is an AWS Premier Partner that makes great things happen for our customers. We are humble and don’t talk about what we do, we would rather talk about what our customers have achieved or even better let them tell the world. But we want to make sure we are the best so we are also an active AWS Managed Services Provider, holder of both the AWS Mobile Competency and the AWS data and Analytics competency – AWS raise the bar and we rise to meet it each year.  Our capabilities and practice encompass everything in the cloud, advanced data, analytics, AI & ML and digital experiences across all channels. We are the true end to end partner, for companies of all sizes that need the best and value experience and expertise. We partner with half of the top 10 ASX and over 100 other Australian companies to help them get the best from their own cloud adoption journey.