Vlaamse Maatschappij voor Watervoorziening (VMW), the largest Flemish water distribution company, has selected Intergraph Belgium to provide a complete GIS and CAE integrated solution. The $1,3 million (US) contract includes Intergraph's industry-leading software technology, GeoMedia and SmartPlant, as well as project consulting, services and hardware.

VMW services 2,5 million customers with a pipeline network of 27 000 km and a yearly production of 140 billion litres of water. VMW chose Intergraph based on the company's technology expertise and ability to provide a global solution backed by a complete customer satisfaction commitment. Intergraph will assist VMW in automating and streamlining engineering, maintenance, construction and operation processes for their complete infrastructure, which covers approximately 50% of Flanders, located in the northern region of Belgium.

Implementation for VMW will occur in two simultaneous projects. The distributed GIS project for water network management and VMW's customer services department begins in early 2000 with the technical specification phase. It is scheduled to be deployed in five regions by the first half of 2001. The solution is based on Intergraph's GeoMedia Water Industry Solution suite for rapid deployment and an Oracle data repository. This GeoMedia technology-based solution will provide a structured environment with all the necessary tools to perform the day-to-day tasks of model design and maintenance, ad hoc and routine analysis of the model and enterprise web data access.

The CAE project automates the workflow for VMW's different engineering departments including the detailed engineering of water production units, the distribution environment and construction of technical buildings. The project will be completed within one year. VMW will use Intergraph's advanced technology such as SmartSketch for 2D drawing, SmartPlant P&ID; for schematics, Survey SelectCAD and Site SelectCAD civil engineering products for profile and section generation, and Asset Information Management (AIM) as the document and data management system for managing the complete infrastructure environment.

Professional services include consulting, project management, technical support, training, third party application integration, and integration of the GIS and CAE environments. All applications will run on Intergraph's performance-proven TDZ 2000 workstations.

Intergraph is a worldwide provider of computer aided engineering solutions. It is represented in South Africa by Intergraph Systems Southern Africa, formerly Intertech Systems. Intertech, a subsidiary of IT group Fintech, was recently involved in a joint venture with black IT and telecommunications empowerment company Ikwezi Group. The company is now majority held by Ikwezi.

Intergraph Systems Southern Africa and IBI

(011) 313 1222

rvolst@intch.co.za