What is waterOutlook
used for?

Client has a network of pump stations spread across a large geographic area. Technicians inspecting and maintaining the assets need to make the most out of their time on site because of the amount of travel involved. Critical data from SCADA and past inspections cannot be viewed on site.

The WaterOutlook mobile app provided them with a one-stop shop for remote data entry and viewing. Field teams have a simple work flow using QR codes to access the data entry form and dashboard for each pump station.

Technicians are able to maximise their productive time on site by minimising administrative overheads and having detailed site information at their fingertips at the start of the job. The team as a whole achieves better awareness of network status through instant alerting of issues and concise summary reports of inspection activities and findings.

The client had paper-based maintenance records, a very large number of forms, and extensive manual data handling. Their visibility of issues and KPIs was limited by the effort required to compile the data.

Digitise all data collection using the WaterOutlook mobile app. Set clear schedules for each task by facility and team. Data entry forms for reactive maintenance allow issues to be flagged quickly and easily while on site. On-demand summary reports provide at-a-glance KPIs for managers and highlight overdue tasks. Logs of open reactive maintenance tasks automatically emailed each week to maintain oversight.

Significant reduction in administrative overheads.

The environmental regulator requires data to be automatically submitted. This meant expensive custom SCADA programming with poor visibility for the client’s compliance team. The number of different systems and monitoring points made it technically impractical and risked punitive action from the regulator due to ongoing delays in data provision.

WaterOutlook connected across all systems simultaneously and provided a scalable solution to configure, control, and monitor their exports. Data feeds provided to the operations team alert them to any issues before data is sent to the regulator. WaterOutlook implemented data transfers using international industry-standard OGC protocols.

This eliminated an exhaustive paper-based reporting procedure and replaced it with a fully-paperless digital solution. And it averted compliance action from the regulator.

Environmental and Drinking Water regulations require data from multiple sources that has to be organised, analysed, and formatted to demonstrate compliance with complex requirements. This involves large amounts of manual data handling, costing valuable time and resources. The client had been unable to submit compliance reports for consecutive years due to staff turnover and overall lack of resources.

WaterOutlook automated every step of the process. Data was automatically collected from multiple sources and securely stored in the cloud. Analytical tools were deployed to transform the data into useful information, and reports and dashboards configured to broadcast the information to stakeholders inside and outside the organisation.

Data is now assimilated into a complete and accurate picture of compliance with no manual intervention. Information is provided to every stakeholder with the depth and timeliness required for their role. Data chain of custody is robust and fully transparent from source to destination, giving regulators total confidence in the data integrity. The client now routinely meets all compliance reporting deadlines and has been able to concentrate resources away from data handling and onto higher-value tasks.

The client operates a wastewater treatment plant servicing a mid-sized urban centre. Such treatment plants produce a waste stream of biosolids which, in the absence of additional capital-intensive treatment equipment, are normally de-watered and sent to landfill with significant environmental and greenhouse gas footprint. In this case example the biosolids are instead thermally treated to produce a fertiliser that can be used by the local farming community. The thermal process needs to be carefully monitored for process efficiency and the fertiliser tested for quality and safety.

Automated data connections to monitor the treatment process, including flows of water, biosolids, and fuel used for thermal drying. The LabOnline module is used to manage and capture laboratory tests of product quality and process efficiency. Consolidated reporting was implemented that combines data from SCADA, laboratory, and manual inputs to track the end-to-end process from raw inputs through to billing and distribution of the end product to customers.

A waste stream that would otherwise have significant environmental and greenhouse gas impact is transformed into a recoverable resource that generates revenue for the client. WaterOutlook provides a platform for quality assurance and performance monitoring to quantify that impact and manage the process end-to-end.

Communities are becoming increasingly aware of the urgency of the climate crisis and the need to monitor and manage their collective carbon footprint. Utility providers have an important role in this process providing vital services to the public and inputs to private industry. This client undertook a “lead by example” approach and committed to a voluntary carbon monitoring and reduction programme. This required aggregation of data from across multiple business units and energy sources.

Data collection processes established to ingest invoice-level data from a multitude of different energy retailers and service providers. This was augmented by existing data collection from SCADA and other internal data sources to capture a comprehensive picture of operations with full chain-of-custody tracking on all data sources to satisfy external auditors and receive annual certification against the voluntary standard. Management-level summary reports of greenhouse gas inventory were generated on a quarterly basis to guide decision making towards carbon footprint reduction over time.

The client achieved certification to the required standard consecutively for all years of the programme, including being a national leader in the magnitude of the reduction of their carbon footprint for one year.

A large Industrial plant uses biogas generated on site as fuel in a large boiler system. The biogas is generated from a covered facultative lagoon some distance from the main plant. The steam boiler was dual fed from reticulated natural gas and biogas. The boiler operators would switch from biogas to natural gas as required to produce steam. The biogas recovery plant was operated by an independent SCADA system from the main plant SCADA system. The Natural Gas metering was via the gas supply company. The three data sources for efficient boiler operation were not connected and it was deemed too expensive to upgrade SCADA systems and install independent meters to improve operations.

WaterOutlook was used to collect data directly from the biogas and plant SCADA systems as well as from the Natural Gas supplier. This data was then used to determine efficient boiler operations. It also led to mass balance calculations that indicated that biogas production was suboptimal which, in turn, led to the discovery of a tear in the pond cover.

The outcome was a very low capital installation that eliminated the need for a costly SCADA/Comms integration and upgrade. The efficiency of the bio-gas production is now managed and compared to natural gas demand, leading to significantly reduced operational cost and lowering the carbon footprint of the industrial site.

Sludge resulting from wastewater treatment has a significant environmental and greenhouse gas footprint. The client had a series of disconnected processes for monitoring the different aspects of sludge treatment and disposal. Environmental data and energy data were feeding into separate management decision-making processes.

Connections established to all sources of data, including SCADA, laboratory analysis, field measurements, and waste disposal records. All sources of data were combined into a single repository in WaterOutlook and a common management reporting framework developed.

All stakeholders – operations, compliance, and sustainability – were able to coordinate their efforts and make decisions based on a common data set. Management-level reports provided useful metrics for quarterly meetings to discuss ways of improving treatment processes and reducing overall carbon footprint.

A group of rural communities draw water from a set of treated, gravity-fed supplies. The local government body providing the water has limited oversight of where water is going, how much each property is consuming, and where water losses might be concentrated. Meter readings are manual and taken only infrequently for billing purposes.

New IoT water meters and a supporting radio network were deployed to capture detailed flow data at each property and across the network. WaterOutlook retrieves the raw data and transforms it into rich summaries of flow and consumption.

The water supplier has detailed insights into how much water each property is consuming and can cross-reference this against other information (such as farm size) to find statistical outliers that might indicate a leak. Minimum night flow measurements and comparisons against historic trends give clear demand management indicators to use as support for water restrictions, if needed. Managers get a single, clear digest of information about full network water balance, rainfall, and the proportion of permitted water take that has been used.

From time to time a large municipality is required to perform emergency chlorination within a public water supply. A contractor is required to respond within a nominated timeframe and the municipality is required to monitor the progress of the job in real time to satisfy regulatory requirements and to manage the contractor’s response KPI.

WaterOutlook was setup to allow multi-agency communications to manage these emergency chlorinations. The job is initiated within WaterOutlook by the client issuing the instruction to chlorinate, this data entry notifies the contractor who then enters their estimated time on site. The client knows the contractor arrival on site via WaterOutlook and, prior to commencing work, the contractor checks the site to certify it is safe to proceed with the works. As the emergency chlorination progresses, all the operational data is recorded and available in real time to the client. At the end of the job, the contractor logs out and a notification of job completion is sent to the client. The data is then gathered into a report which is sent to the client as well as stored on WaterOutlook for future reference by the client.

The municipality now has full visibility of emergency works. The contractor performance is measured in real time from the job initiation to completion. All the data and reporting is fully available for audit.