Cityworks

Founded in 1986, Azteca Systems supports more than 650 customers throughout the United States and around the world ranging in size from single user sites to installations that service millions of people and multiple disciplines. These clients include public works agencies, large and small communities, water/wastewater/stormwater districts, streets and traffic, parks and recreation, facilities, and other organizations involved with capital assets infrastructure and the maintenance associated with its care and operation.

Azteca Systems began as a consulting firm focused on delivering mapping support to US Federal agencies. Earning a solid reputation in the application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the company was sought to help public works agencies understand and implement GIS in their organizations. As a result, Azteca Systems’ attention was turned toward the management and care of assets and infrastructure. The company pioneered a new approach to work management with Cityworks and in 1996 released the first iteration of the product.

A recognized industry leader, Azteca Systems created Cityworks, a GIS-centric asset maintenance management solution integrated with Esri’s GIS technology. The Cityworks approach is innovative and unique among a cadre of legacy systems, leveraging the inherent value and investment of GIS data.

What is Cityworks?

Cityworks empowers GIS to manage both physical infrastructure and land-focused asset management. Organizations allocate considerable resources toward developing and maintaining their GIS, Cityworks capitalizes on this valuable resource. Cityworks and Esri ArcGIS combine to make the perfect platform for designing and creating GIS-centric public asset management solutions.

Service requests, work orders, inspections, and projects are used to track citizen concerns and all types of work activities—cyclical or reactive—with their associated costs. Map layers can be created to display information such as all open requests, pavement condition, all repaired potholes for a given time period, etc. Reports of all types can be generated on the fly using various search parameters or set up as customized templates. Cityworks empowers staff at all levels—field workers, call takers, and administration—to get the information they need to perform their jobs efficiently and make wise use of the resources to manage assets and provide services. Adding Cityworks Server PLL to a deployment provides all the land-focused asset management capabilities for permitting, licensing, and code enforcement

In order to effectively manage assets, one needs to know what and where they are. At the core of any asset management system is an asset inventory. Cityworks is uniquely designed to utilize the GIS geodatabase as the asset inventory. Though other approaches may interface with a GIS – generally for map visualization – Cityworks truly utilizes the GIS geodatabase as the asset inventory.

Cityworks leverages the inherent value of a GIS-centric, enterprise asset inventory by not only managing the assets and their associated attributes (type, condition, installation date, etc.), but also the work done to care for assets. The linkage between assets and work orders is maintained such that the history of completed work orders against a specific asset is viewable and is easily retrieved. If an asset is not yet identified in the geodatabase, Cityworks can manage work performed by associating it to a valid address and later seamlessly updating the history once the asset is reflected in the geodatabase.

Unique to GIS, assets can be modeled in real-world representations. Features can be shown on an intuitive map view and visualized in a hierarchy table form. An asset can be represented as a point, line or polygon feature. As well, related assets can be attached to a primary feature, allowing for a visualization of assets that are traditionally difficult to see in map views. For example, a traffic signal can be modeled as a point—the point being the base or mounting platform upon which the traffic signal pole stands. Various items such as crossing signals, pedestrian buttons, junction boxes and mast arms can all be attached to the pole (point) as related objects—each as a separate asset.

Maintenance management can only be performed with an accurate asset inventory. Today, most maintenance management systems have incorporated the practices of asset and maintenance management together into a single application. Cityworks is unique in that it also brings the location component of these features into the System Environment. Being built on top of the leading GIS software, Cityworks brings together powerful technologies into an intuitive, easy-to-use interface to perform both asset and maintenance management.

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