Case Study: San Antonio Water System achieves $1M in data-management savings and rapid GIS data integration with Safe Software

San Antonio Water System - Customer Case Study

San Antonio Water System (SAWS), a Texas utility serving about one million customers and maintaining more than 9,000 miles of water and sewer mains, faced major data interoperability problems that stalled its enterprise GIS and asset-management goals. Critical information—billing and account tables, operations databases and hundreds of Microstation map layers—lived in disparate formats and lacked accurate spatial ties, forcing GIS staff into a slow, manual cleanup of 500,000 addresses that proved unsustainable.

SAWS implemented Esri’s ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension (powered by FME) to automate conversion, validation and integration workflows. The team turned lengthy tasks into minutes, used an automated “point snapper” to correct 211,000 sewer points in three days and populated 171,000 lateral measurements in two days, and established weekly QA/QC checks. The result was a web-enabled GIS that supports automated work orders, improves billing and operations, and delivered roughly $1 million in first-year data‑management savings.

San Antonio Water System

Cindy Tuttle

SAWS