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5 Game-Changing Ways AI is Transforming Water Management

In the near future, AI-enabled digital twins and advanced predictive analytics will help utilities not just react, but proactively manage resources, keeping water systems resilient and adaptable in an era of growing challenges.

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Using Better Data to Tackle the Industrial Pretreatment Challenge

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Better, Faster, Safer: How New AI Tools Could Transform Water Management for the Better

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Introducing Klir Comply with ChatGPT Integration on Microsoft Azure

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Leaving Linko Behind: How the City of Tyler Streamlined Pretreatment with Klir

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Less Stress, More Certainty: How North Charleston Modernized Pretreatment with Klir

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For Oregon’s Clean Water Services, Digital Transformation is About Smarter Watershed Management

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Located on the Tualatin River Basin, Clean Water Services in Oregon serves a population of over 600,000 residents in urban Washington County and businesses including Nike and Intel. A fitting name, Clean Water Services is internationally recognized as a leader for holistic watershed management, and a One Water approach that integrates wastewater and stormwater collection and treatment.

But it wasn’t always this way. This is the story of how a polluted river, reduced to just a stream, spawned what today has become one of the most innovative water systems in America.

In this article, we’ll dive into key lessons from CWS’ digital transformation, and how it flows from a commitment to watershed restoration.

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Necessity breeds innovation

Then...

In the late 1960s, Washington County’s water was in crisis. The Tualatin River, the area’s only river, was choked with pollution. Twenty-six treatment plants were discharging contaminated wastewater into area streams, provoking a moratorium on any new development in the region. The viability of the entire region was in question.

In the summer, the river was so small in some places, you could stand across it.

By 1970, the people of Washington County voted two-to-one in favor of creating a regional sewer utility—one of the first in the state. The vote signaled the community’s early commitment to protecting public health and the local environment through clean water.

And now...

Fast forward to today, and Clean Water Services’ CEO Diane Taniguchi-Dennis will tell you that everything the organization does aims to protect public health while enhancing the natural environment of Oregon's Tualatin River Watershed.

That means that CWS’ job doesn’t stop at the treatment plant: it includes building salmon habitat, planting a canopy that mitigates evaporation, and offering conservation education.

As organic as it all might sound, these initiatives aren’t driven by intuition. They’re backed by cold, hard data, and a commitment to innovation.

For Washington Country, there’s no other way: this is about securing a safe water supply for generations to come.

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Digital transformation requires culture change

In an industry historically focused on pipes and pumps, CWS has learned to stop viewing itself as a team of engineers, and instead as 400 water entrepreneurs working together to leverage science and technology through the power of Mother Nature.

“In my experience, significant sustainable advances in smart water are only possible through culture change,” says Taniguchi-Dennis. “It's really about a mindset focused on learning, thriving, and growing that drives digital transformation.”

The defining features of CWS’ culture of innovation include:

Practicing agility and change readiness.
Becoming less hierarchical and more networked.
Bridging gaps between different subject matter expertise via multidisciplinary project teams.

It’s a commitment that cascades across every level of the organization, but is perhaps best illustrated by the tech team.

Transform IT into a Digital Solutions team

Innovating at the watershed-scale depends on having the right leaders around the table. That’s why CWS has transformed its IT department from a service center into a strategic business partner.

The Digital Solutions team, led by Dr. Ting Lu, is a confluence of Information Technology (IT), Operations Technology (OT), and Engineering Technology (ET) that supports the organization on everything from permit compliance to optimizing water for the region.

This team’s impact has been transformative, having introduced:

Dashboards to support transparency & decision making throughout the district
Real-time controls to optimize storm runoff capacity
Automated vehicle-locator technology, sewer sensors and GIS data integration for data driven operations
Technology to optimize basin planning and risk management
Virtual collaboration and learning platforms
Open-source, low cost IoT sensor solutions

And they’re not stopping there.

Dr. Lu shared her vision for the next decade: “We would like to be using smart water and digital twin systems to provide insights and operational and planning decision support to not only our gray infrastructure, but also integrating our green infrastructure, natural systems and the watershed together at scale.”

Start with the basics

Like any good digital strategy, CWS started with the basics: compliance.

In 1991, the organization was targeting an aggressive Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDL) target of 0.1 milligrams of phosphorus per liter, which meant they needed to be operating some of the most advanced wastewater treatment facilities of the time.

The effort was so paramount, it provoked its own sing-song slogan: “Point one in ninety one!”

So, when CWS later ran into a thermal compliance issue based on excess ammonia in the water from fisheries, they saw the opportunity to rise above their regulatory duty and take control of their own destiny.

“We realized that just focusing on the water chemistry or water quality wasn't going to be enough to really meet the promise that the Clean Water Act brings to us, which is fishable, swimmable, drinkable waters,” says Taniguchi-Dennis.

Instead of putting chillers at the treatment facility outfalls—where the benefit would have washed away just a few miles downstream—CWS decided to look at the problem holistically across the watershed. The solution? Planting trees and shrubs along the river and its tributaries.

And thanks to innovation at every level—from financing and revegetation to partnerships that tap into new revenue sources—CWS has the resources to do so quickly. Where CWS could previously plant 2 million trees and shrubs in a decade, they can now reach that target in a single year.

“You have to get to a point where regulatory compliance is just one part of an output of what your utility does, but really your purpose, or the outcomes you're trying to achieve, are so much greater than that,” says Taniguchi-Dennis.

“And that's really what smart technology is starting to allow us to do. It's allowing us to really hear what's going on in the environment.”

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How to Prepare for PFAS (& Avoid a PR Disaster)

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“A town's water is contaminated with 'forever chemicals' – how did it get this bad?” That’s one of the headlines that residents of Pittsboro, North Carolina, woke up to earlier this year when the Guardian published a story about the community’s water supply.

Researchers had found that a local Chemours/DuPont chemical plant had released potentially toxic amounts of Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—also known as PFAS or “forever chemicals”—into the town’s water supply.

As more of these investigations play out in the public eye, PFAS represents one of the greatest threats to public confidence in drinking water in recent memory.

For municipal leaders and water operators across the country, the question is: what can you do to prepare?

PFAS Goes Public

PFAS entered the national conversation just a few years ago, but research has already linked them to everything from liver cancer to reproductive health issues, and some states have moved to ban them altogether. Congress began to move on PFAS last month when it passed the PFAS Action Act of 2021, which will require the EPA to establish national standards for PFAS levels in drinking water in the future.

Although the EPA already includes PFAS on the list of contaminants it tracks under the unregulated contaminant monitoring rule (UCMR), few laws currently exist dictating what utilities should and shouldn’t be doing about PFAS.

But if you ask WaterPIO founder and communications expert Mike McGill, utilities waiting for directives from legislators are missing a key opportunity to position themselves as leaders on the issue.

“The next time the EPA updates UCMR, you might have to start testing for dozens of different PFAS, and those testing requirements might cover more and smaller utilities. And if that's the case, you’ll have to start communicating about PFAS as soon as you can.”

The Price of Waiting

Much is still unknown about the exact health risks posed by PFAS and the best ways to eliminate them from our water supply. But one thing is for sure: just because PFAS isn’t a problem in your backyard right now doesn’t mean that it won’t eventually be.

“Academics and activists are out there in the interest of protecting public health. They're going to conduct tests in our waterways, and they are going to find these chemicals, and when they do find them, they're going to keep making headlines,” says Mike McGill, who like many other water experts, believes we’re due for a reckoning on PFAS.

He says that if utilities don’t become the first communicators on the subject—that is, the first point of truth that the public turns to for accurate PFAS information in the local water supply—they risk losing control of the narrative completely.

“It becomes a scandal, if you will. Then suddenly we have to start throwing solutions against the wall to make up for the fact that we're behind. And that's where you start making mistakes.”

Utilities that choose to wait until they’re forced to respond risk the following:

Losing Time and Money

Waiting can get expensive. McGill recalls how one water utility in North Carolina spent more than $150 million on a facility to treat water for less than 100,000 people in a rush to address a local PFAS contamination.

PFAS treatment technologies like granular activated carbon (GAC) and ion exchange are already expensive, but if utilities wait until they’re forced to act, they risk scrambling to calm a distraught customer base and hastily picking a treatment solution that might not work for them in the long term.

Losing Control of the Narrative

Just because utilities didn’t create the PFAS problem doesn’t mean they should be afraid of taking responsibility and claiming the issue as their own.

Not doing so could mean that someone else—regulators, environmentalists, manufacturers, or even customers themselves—takes control of the narrative. And as McGill emphasizes, when utility customers discover that they have potential carcinogens in their drinking water, “it wasn’t me!” probably won’t cut it as an excuse.

“If you're not leading the conversation, then the customer is [simply] going to blame the utility for something they didn't do.”

Eroding Trust

Utilities will have to ‘go first’ when it comes to communicating the threats and challenges of PFAS, and for many organizations—especially smaller utilities not used to doing lots of communications work—doing so might seem like a nerve-wracking experience.

But McGill says waiting could fundamentally erode a utility’s relationship with its customers.

“I used to run a newsroom for a couple of years, and we had an old adage: ‘if I hear from you first, I trust you first. If I hear from you last, I trust you last.’”

Testing, Treatment, and Transparency

If you’re looking to get ahead of PFAS, Santa Clarita Valley (SCV) Water Agency sets a shining example for a successful communications strategy.

In 2019, California state officials started asking utilities to test wells for PFAS contaminants. The order didn’t require agencies to take any further action, even if they discovered high levels of these contaminants.

Still, when SCV discovered that one of their wells had exceeded the 70 nanograms per liter advisory level, they sprung into action. They shut down the contaminated well, and began sampling all of their other wells for PFAS.

The agency quickly put in motion plans to build a new treatment facility, but its plan would rely on an even more immediate line of defence.

SCV embarked on an ambitious communications campaign to bring their fight with PFAS out into the open, led by communications manager Kathie Martin.

The agency began posting regular updates about PFAS testing, changes in regulations, and progress on their (now complete) treatment facility construction to a dedicated portal on their website, social media, and the agency’s email newsletter. Customers also had ample opportunity to learn about PFAS offline, at community meetings and via direct mail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeSVWys61JY

“Not only were we trying to be completely transparent upfront. We also wanted to be a little bit ahead of the game. That turned out to be the right decision,” says SCV operations director Mike Alvord.

The Benefits of Communicating Proactively on PFAS

So, should your agency take a leap of faith, or adopt a “wait and see” approach?

Experts like Mike McGill argue that effectively communicating on the issue could result in lasting, long term benefits:

Develop a Leadership Advantage

‘Going first’ on PFAS won’t just allow utilities to cut down on public relations risk. It could also permanently cement their place as leaders and experts on the issue, building lasting credibility with customers, media and other stakeholders who are looking for answers.

“If you are willing to get out front and say, ‘we're going to test, and we want to go above and beyond, because that's what we think our role is as the provider of safe clean drinking water is,’ there's a lot of power behind that. Especially when you get results,” points out McGill.

Influence Policy

One specific advantage to adopting a leadership position on an under-regulated contaminant like PFAS is that utilities stand to meaningfully shape policy as it’s being written.

The more effective utilities are at communicating the on-the-ground realities of treating water for PFAS, the more likely it is that those realities will inform future legislation.

Build More Proactive Organizations in General

The benefits of effectively communicating on issues like PFAS also go beyond any single contaminant or treatment project.

As SCV’s Alvord points out, his organization’s radically transparent approach to the issue did more than just alleviate Santa Clarita Valley residents’ fears about PFAS. It also helped his organization come together and build a strong work culture in the wake of an 2018 SCV agency merger that combined four separate water utilities into one.

“We brought in different cultures, different personalities, and we immediately had to work together because we had to try to form our own new culture,” says Alvord, noting how SCV’s efforts to remain transparent to the public also ended up making the organization more transparent to itself, and therefore more cohesive.

“If we were separate, I think it would have been much more difficult.”

Proven practices for PFAS PR

Taking a lessons from agencies like SCV, here are some approaches to consider as you look to communicate how your agency is acting on the PFAS problem:

1. Take Credit for Your Work

The first step of any good PFAS communication strategy is to take stock of what your organization is already doing about the issue, and to not be afraid to brag about it.

Have you already started testing for certain PFAS? Has your utility already started working with PFAS treatment technologies like reverse osmosis, GAC, and ion exchange? Then your customers need to hear about it.

Make sure that any valuable work you’re already doing on PFAS doesn’t get buried or confined to just one communication channel, either.

“I worked with one utility that tested for 75 different PFAS, and their data was spectacular. But they only made a passing reference about that in their water quality report,” points out Mike McGill.

These types of documents tend to get buried on your website. If you’re not actively pushing this information out to the public, it will likely fall by the wayside.

2. Identify Other PFAS Advocates and Experts

It might also be useful to take stock of other experts in your network or area who might be doing important PFAS work.

Are there any local academics who have published research on PFAS in the past? Environmentalists who have lobbied local governments? Media outlets who have published stories about PFAS? Now might be a good time to become familiar with them and their work, and use it to inform your strategy.

3. Take a Leadership Role

Even if your utility already does excellent work on PFAS and has good relationships with external stakeholders, you might still feel apprehensive about broadcasting those efforts to your customers.

McGill understands why utilities might be nervous to take the lead, but he says that the ones that do stand to benefit far more in the long run than those who stay quiet.

“You need to become a thought leader, because by doing so you help out the entire industry. You show the path of how to handle it properly.”

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Acting Fast on PFAS: Now is the Time

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How One California Water Utility is Leading the Fight Against the ‘Forever Chemicals’

If you work in water and wastewater, you might remember Erin Brockovich’s successful 1993 lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), which proved the company had contaminated a small California town's water supply with a toxic compound called chromium 6.

The $333 million settlement Brockovich negotiated is still the largest in U.S. history, and the wave of awareness her case brought to environmental toxins–helped along by the eponymous 2000 Oscar-winning Julia Roberts film–is considered by many environmentalists today to be a turning point in environmental policy.

So, when the Santa Clarita Valley (SCV) Water Agency’s Mike Alvord first heard about per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or “PFAS” in 2019, he was certain the general public was due for a similar wake up call.

Ohio residents had launched a similar class action lawsuit alleging a DuPont chemical plant had contaminated the drinking water of 70,000 people with PFAS in the early 2000s. A film about the lawsuit titled Dark Waters starring Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway premiered in 2019, just a few months after the state of California ordered water utilities like SCV to start sampling wells for PFAS. At one point Erin Brockovich herself even re-emerged into the public eye to sound the alarm on PFAS.

“I really thought that was going to be the next Erin Brockovich,” says Alvord.

But the premiere of Dark Waters came and went, and the anticipated wave of public outcry against PFAS never materialized.

“It didn't turn into much. Maybe [with COVID] there were too many distractions.”

Despite the relatively tepid public response, Alvord and his colleagues at SCV knew that PFAS was real and that it wasn’t going away any time soon. So instead of waiting for regulators and the public to catch up, they decided to get ahead of the problem.

What is PFAS?

PFAS (pronounced ‘Pee-Fass’) are a class of synthetic “forever chemicals” found in everything from nonstick pans to takeout containers to the foams used in firefighting.

“It's ubiquitous. The United States has been manufacturing PFAS chemicals since the fifties, and consumers have been enjoying the benefits of PFAS chemicals for decades,” says Alvord.

Studies have shown that PFAS may be associated with reproductive health issues, testicular and kidney cancer, high cholesterol and suppression of vaccine effectiveness in children, and that it might already be present in 98 out of every 100 people’s bloodstreams.

Some European countries and Maine have banned the compounds, but American water utilities are still grappling with how to best manage these contaminants. Most of them weren’t aware of PFAS until 2015 when the EPA added it to the list of contaminants it tracks under the unregulated contaminant monitoring rule (UCMR), and to this day there are few concrete rules around PFAS.

Alvord is the Director of Operations and Maintenance at SCV, which provides water to more than 300,000 business and residential customers in Southern California. When he and his colleagues discovered that one of the agency’s wells had exceeded the EPA’s advisory level of 70 nanograms per liter for two PFAS chemicals in 2019, no law or rule required them to shut down the well.

“But we immediately shut it off. We didn't have to, but we did–for the sake of the public and the sake of the uncertainty. We just didn't know what was going on.”

The First Line of Defence: Transparency

Instead of dealing with it quietly, the SCV decided to bring their fight with PFAS out into the open.

The 2019 California order had only required SCV to sample 15 of their wells for PFAS, but the agency began sampling all of them. They also began posting regular updates about their findings to their website, and took a radically transparent approach to informing their customers about the PFAS threat in Southern California.

Alvord says that transparency didn’t just help SCV act quickly on the PFAS problem. It also helped the agency–which was formed after the state merged four separate water utilities in 2018–find its feet as a new organization, come together as a team, and build a strong work culture on short notice.

“We brought in different cultures, different personalities, and we immediately had to work together because we had to try to form our own new culture,” says Alvord.

“If we were separate, even though we worked well together separately, I think it would have been much more difficult.”

Removing PFAS from Water

Most drinking water & wastewater utilities have three lines of defence against PFAS. They can use:

1. Reverse osmosis, which forces water through a high-pressure membrane.

2. Granular activated carbon, like the kind you find in refrigerator water filtration systems, which is also the most studied PFAS removal solution.

3. Ion exchange, a process by which PFAS compounds are absorbed into a special kind of resin.

The problem is that none of these technologies were originally designed to remove PFAS from the water, and they each have room for improvement.

The energy costs involved in reverse osmosis, for example, usually make it prohibitively expensive for water utilities. Granular activated carbon can also get expensive, not just materials-wise but also because of the amount of byproduct that needs to be disposed of.

Even ion exchange, the solution SCV settled on, can be challenging in the amount of byproduct it produces.

Staying Flexible and Keeping an Open Mind

More interesting than SCV’s technology choice itself, however, is the sheer speed with which the water agency was able to design, permit, and build the facility–during the COVID shutdown no less.

SCV’s new PFAS treatment facility in Valencia is an impressive sight: six massive vessels filled with ion exchange resin churn through up to 6,250 gallons of water per minute, enough to serve an estimated 5,000 households every year.

Most agencies would have taken years to build the facility, but that was time that Alvord says the SCV didn’t have when they embarked on the project in 2019.

“So instead, we did all of it at the same time. We were doing planning, bidding for construction, design–all of that simultaneously.”

It took just one year to construct the facility, which today produces upwards of 6,000 gallons of clean water per minute and has become a template for future plants slated for construction.

Alvord doesn’t recommend other utilities hold themselves to a similarly tight deadline. But he says the resourcefulness and speed SCV was able to bring to the treatment plant project is a product of the organization’s culture of flexibility and cooperation between groups like engineering and operations.

“Don't just leave it up to your engineering group to do everything: spread the wealth and, you know, spread the pain,” suggests Alvord, acknowledging the tension that can sometimes exist between technically-minded engineers and operators with their eye on the bottom line.

“Engineers have to rely on operations staff to tell them what's in the field, so make sure you do those field visits together, so that what they're planning is going to match with what's happening in reality.”

The Value of Good Communication and tTust

Talking to Alvord, it quickly becomes clear that SCV’s ability to get ahead of the PFAS problem is as much an organizational achievement as it is a technical one.

When asked about what advice he’d give to organizations and operations leaders trying to replicate those results, Alvord reiterates the importance of transparency, openness, and communication in the water industry.

“I preach that the two most important things to be successful are good communication and building relationships,” says Alvord, who also works as an instructor in the Water Systems Technology department at a local college.

“If you can learn to communicate effectively without sounding arrogant, without sounding offensive or derogatory, you're going to be ahead of the game.”

Looking to get ahead of PFAS regulation? Start by automating your water monitoring plan with Klir. Talk to one of our specialists today.

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How to Automate Your Water Monitoring Plan

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As regulations become more numerous and complex, water monitoring plans follow suit. Restrictive budgets and personnel shortages don’t make the job any easier.

How is your utility keeping up? With sampling responsibilities spread across different teams and individuals, and data constantly coming in from these different sources, how do you know you’re using resources efficiently?

Automating your water monitoring plan with technology can help you avoid errors, save time, and adapt to new reporting protocols.

In this article, you’ll learn how to use automation to track and execute your water monitoring plan, so that your team will be ready for anything that comes down the pipe.

What does it mean to automate your water monitoring plan?

Sampling runs, lab tests, these are important jobs carried out onsite by skilled individuals. But the work that goes into scheduling those sampling events and consolidating the results? Those administrative tasks take up valuable time—and that’s where technology is well suited to play a role.

With the right software, you can instantly analyze reams of sampling data, build out comprehensive and adaptable sampling schedules, and generate regulatory reports at the click of a button.

Why automate your water monitoring plan?

When you automate your water monitoring plan, you minimize the administrative work that’s involved. For compliance managers, those time savings can free up an entire workday every week.

Plus, an automated water monitoring plan can deliver benefits across the organization:

Break down data silos

If the Water Quality Department is maintaining Safe Drinking Water standards, another team is managing NPDES permit samples, and yet another team is managing samples based on customer complaints, how can you tell where these needs intersect and overlap?

Automation creates a single source of truth, bringing all sampling activities into a single view. Information that once lived in spreadsheets or filing cabinets can now be made accessible utility-wide. Plus, your efforts go further: non-compliance sampling results can be easily attributed to overlapping regulatory reporting needs.

Manage timelines across multiple departments

As new sampling needs come up, an automated online schedule lets you adapt. Easily slot in new runs while ensuring that all other testing requirements are being met on time.

Simplify monitoring & reporting

Online tools can unlock instant analysis of the raw data coming in from your LIMS. Then, generating a monthly report is as easy as clicking a button.

Rather than struggling with Excel or Word templates, where duplicate files and offline edits lead to mistakes, you can create standardized reporting templates that feed in accurate data from the same source every time.

Improve consumer confidence

With powerful tools to analyze sampling results in real-time, you can feel confident that you always have an accurate read on water quality. That means that when issues arise, you can mitigate the consequences with faster interventions and proactive communications.

And when it comes time to generate your annual Consumer Confidence Report, there’s no scrambling to consolidate and reconcile Excel sheets. You have all the data you need—accurate, up-to-date, and accessible.

Tools to automate your water monitoring plan

There are many tools that you can implement to automate your water monitoring plan. Some software tools are purpose-built for the job, while other familiar tools like spreadsheets and basic online scheduling software can be configured to introduce some level of “automation”, despite limitations.

If you have the time, resources, and expertise to set up a series of Excel sheets to track all your compliance tasks, for instance, it may be able to save your organization a lot of time and energy. Otherwise, these tools can end up being just “more of the same,” adding to the complexity of your current plan.

The following list weighs the pros and cons of both DIY and cloud-based digital tools for automating your water monitoring plan—many of which may already be in use:

PDFs

Use: Formatting and compiling reports

Pros:

Compatible across multiple computer systems
Relatively straightforward to generate reports from templates

Cons:

Will not automatically populate with reporting data
Multiple versions of reports (drafts) can create confusion

Spreadsheets

Use: Collating data, doing simple calculations

Pros:

Familiar to many users at your organization
Can be incredibly simple or very complicated, depending on user skill level and need

Cons:

Difficult or impossible to integrate with other systems, such as scheduling software or LIMS
Typically must be manually updated
Offline or duplicate file versions introduce risk

Cloud-based scheduling apps

Use: Tracking sampling runs and frequency

Pros:

Cloud-based scheduling software lets you share schedules between multiple teams and individuals
Ability to create recurring events

Cons:

Information is separate from where sampling data “lives”

Purpose built cloud software (eg. Klir)

Use: Task-management including scheduling sampling runs, analyzing water quality data & automating reporting

Pros:

Introduces single source of truth with all sampling data in one location
Integrates with LIMS and other systems
Accessible utility-wide, with the ability to set permissions, schedule and assign tasks
Automatically generates reports from data
Delivers automatic alerts for crossed thresholds
Can be easily modified and expanded by users to adapt to new sampling requirements
Tailored to water utilities

Cons:

Possible pushback from individuals accustomed to spreadsheets and traditional methods of scheduling / data management
May require organizational changes as processes become more efficient

Steps to automating your water monitoring plan

Here are six steps to follow when automating your water monitoring plan:

1. Identify sampling needs across your organization

Document where and when sampling events are occurring across the organization for both regulatory or non-regulatory purposes. Part of this process may involve connecting with different departments, interviewing key personnel, and learning about their goals—as well as the difficulties they face.

Some tools are built to help you compile and systemize these requirements, so your software supplier may be able to help with this step. If you’re taking the DIY route (say, using Excel), this work may involve consolidating documents on a single internal server.

2. Feed in data inputs

Determine how your system is going to connect with your LIMS and the other places data “lives”. Do the tools you’re using allow you to automatically import LIMS data? How will other sources of information, like SCADA, integrate with your system?

If this information is online, the goal should be to feed the data directly into the system through a secure intermediary (typically called an API). Purpose-built software like Klir can pull this data in automatically. If these data sources are air-gapped, you might need to identify which personnel are responsible for providing the raw data imports on a regular basis (say, nightly).

3. Document your processes

Different sampling requirements have different processes—in terms of frequency, types of testing and reporting, chains of custody, and practical matters of access for technical operators.

To automate your monitoring plan, you’ll need to document the process for each sampling event within your organization.

Then, make sure the personnel involved have access to this information, ideally within the system that you’re using to schedule jobs.

4. Set alerts for important thresholds

Any utility tracks for 90+ contaminants within a given year, and querying a spreadsheet is not only time consuming, it exposes you to the risk of missing something.

With an automated system, you can set parameters so that the system will proactively alert you any time the levels are approaching or exceeding a limit. When silence is a good thing—when your system isn’t telling you your levels are in danger of crossing the line—you can rest easy.

5. Schedule sampling jobs

Once you have all of your sampling requirements, you can create a master schedule, with filters for different departments, types of reporting, etc.

Your master schedule will include samples that must be taken weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly. This will be a key reference point to assign tasks and work orders. That’s why the option to filter specific reporting requirements or create sub-schedules is key—so every individual can find what they’re looking for, without sacrificing insight into the schedule as a whole.

Of course, sampling schedules change, so a truly automated system should be able to account for contingencies and reallocate resources accordingly.

6. Generate reports

Finally, automation will let you quickly, easily, and consistently generate reports from the data that you’re constantly generating. Ideally, this step involves establishing a template once, so that the system can pull in accurate data from the same data input at any given time.

────────

Automating your water monitoring plan saves you time, reduces the likelihood of errors, and improves communication at all levels of your organization.

While you can use tools to develop a DIY approach, automated systems like Klir are the fastest, easiest way to get up and running.

Ready to learn more? Talk to one of our specialists to learn about automating your utility’s water monitoring plan.

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7 Laws of Compliance Planning

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Op-Ed by David Lynch, Co-Founder and CEO of Klir

Those who have seen me speak publicly or read some of my previous work may know how much I tip Compliance Resource Planning as being the next big thing not just in water, where it is now prevalent but in other sectors where it is emerging. I am often asked what are the core principles when in comes to CRP implementations in Water so I have decided to write down what I see as the seven universal principles of CRP systems. The beauty of the internet is I get to revise and add to these rather than committing to ink so please do input with your thoughts and experience!

1. Compliance is your North Star

This doesn't mean every regulation you are forced to adhere to is right, correct, practical or a good idea. Very, very far from it. I would never suggest such a thing! But the spirit of the regulation and your corporate objectives must be tightly aligned.A great example of this is the water sector. The Safe Drinking Water in the US aims to do exactly what it says, make drinking water safe for human consumption. Is its interpretation or how it manifests in permits always right? No but the core objective of a water utility and the regulation is the exact same. Compare this with a mining operation whose core objective is profit first and foremost. It operates in a space with a variety of regulation which is at odds to this core purpose. Therefore implementing CRP would not work as it isn't aligned to the companies North Star. If it was a triple bottom line company or a certified B corp then CRP would work but not a strict profit only entity.You must be intellectually honest with yourself and your colleagues to truly ask if your organizations mission & culture is the same as the regulation which dominates your space.

2. Compliance Team versus Compliance Organization

In nearly every water utility I have seen worldwide, a compliance team or some variant of it exists. I imagine this came to pass when business consultants started designing utility hierarchy's and took their inspiration from manufacturing. I know that's what I did in a early stage of my career. The fact of the matter is this won't work. It must be many peoples responsibility across your organization to do their job in a way which bubbles compliances up rather than retrospectively patching it.Take the example above of a water utility versus a profit driven mining company. In the later, there would most likely be a Health and Safety or Compliance Team isolated from the rest of the operation. They would spend their time chasing data, enforcing processes and applying/maintaining permits so the rest of the team can get on with their day to day job. Unfortunately, as too often is the case, their peers don't give them the respect they deserve and they are see as just another line item on their requirements list.In a progressive water utility there will be an executive responsible for compliance and will work closely with the CEO/General Manager/Director. Their job is not to 'do compliance' but instead work it into the organization as a cultural and mission driven focus. CRP is the tool that does this and moves data & jobs around so that it is everyones responsibility

3. It is a stand alone system

If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say 'Sure we can just get our existing Asset/CRM/Operations/Legal (delete as appropriate) system to do that with some customization' I would be the largest commodity owner of nickel-copper in the world. No one would dare suggest using the same pipes for sewerage and drinking water. Or to use a less extreme example, you wouldn't use Excel to manage a cash register. Just because a system can use a feature for many use cases doesn't mean it should. I often urge users to get the root of why this approach is suggested and in almost all cases it is because a huge budget was blown on implementing one of these systems that never quite worked. The sponsor (or someone ordained by them) is furiously trying to find a use for what they were mis sold.A good CRP system promoter will say explicitly what it does do (manage X, Y & Z process) but also explicitly tell you what it doesn't do. A simple test can weed out the bad system by asking can you put a process/area into it that has nothing to do with Compliance. For example, if you ask can you manage HR or Assets in the system and they say 'Of course, YES!' then run a mile.

4. Remove human error, not the human element

There is a great example of an AI competition that takes place annually pitting humans against computers. In one example, a AI system to detect cancer in mammograms was set against experienced radiologists. A computer has never beaten a human at this challenge and can detect cancerous cells correctly around 91% of the time. The human radiologist gets it right about 97% of the time. But the interesting thing is if your build a platform that 'suggests' detecting to radiologists which they then review, the accuracy goes to about 99.9%. This might only sound like a few percentage points increase but for anyone who has had the pleasure of learning about statistical distribution, this level of improvement is extremely impressive.This is a very critical element of CRP and one that is particularly important in water. CRP will never serve to cut jobs. Instead it will free up your existing team that have incredible talents to more optimally and economically manage compliance. CRP will augment your users to make the best decisions more of the time rather than have them focus on cleansing data or reformatting excel sheets.

5. The system must continually iterate

A CRP system should be a system to records insights. That may sound extremely nebulous but if you critically challenge any proposed system and ask ‘Will this exponentially over time automatically reduce effort expended on work that doesn’t affect compliance?’ you will have a very good gut instinct. But what does this mean in practice?With the modern tools available at low cost to software designers today every system should facilitate prediction of what tasks make a difference. This should be represented in a closed feedback look of Data->Decision->Outcome->Check. In one over simplified example, say you are receiving telemetry from a sensor and you make a decision to do something because of an undesired elevated reading, the system should record if the desired outcome was achieved through data (such as the reading being reduced on the telemetry system). If it did then the task should be auto suggested to users and if it didn’t then the system should learn that this course of action doesn’t work.

6. Very few barriers to adoption

A successful CRP implementation requires many users both internal and external to an organization providing data at different points of time. Some users spend every minute in the system and some see it once in their career and never again. If any element of this ecosystem breaks or is prevented from engaging then the CRP implementation will fail. The three most common barriers to entry I have see are:Prohibitive licensing requirements. For example every user is required to have an expensive licence which proves impractical and cost prohibitive.People need to adapt to the system rather than the system adapt to them. Of course some change is always required but fundamentally changing processes because of system limitations is a big red flag.An extension of the previous point is extremely well thought out user experience. The system must be user obsessed and allow a variety of users (from technophobes using it once off, to expert super admins using it daily) extract maximum value with minimal effort.

7. Explicit, aligned success criteria

In almost all cases you should be using a vendor with specific domain and system expertise. This vendor’s success must be heavily driven off what you deem success and no more. Driving them down on pricing will mean they will be forced to recoup on consulting or change requests. Similarly if their measure of success is the amount of consulting days sold every year after implementation then it is a misfit.Setting out what success looks like for you and your users early and often makes sure everyone is continually aligned. You should draw confidence from how they describe the approach they will take to meet your success criteria. If it is constantly pushed back as ancillary then they are not the right partner for you.

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Jumping The Permit Compliance Hurdle

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How could water utilities better plan for permit compliance? For any entity conducting business – whether it is providing a public service or selling a good – predictability is a key to long-term survival. You might not be able to control input cost changes, shifts in demand, or adverse events, but the better you can foresee and prepare for them, the more you will be empowered to ensure your sustainability.

As Goes Permit Compliance, So Goes Predictability and Sustainability

The sustainability of water utilities hinges on regulatory and permit compliance at the local, state and federal levels. If they cannot get permits, they cannot get off the ground to begin with. But maintaining compliance is the 800-pound gorilla. If permits are violated, utilities can often keep handling wastewater and providing drinking water, as these services are public health-critical, but violations are unsustainably costly on many fronts:

Fines can be huge and compound on a daily basis as long as violations are outstanding. Violations can also mean lengthy and expensive legal proceedings involving other government entities, interest groups, and citizens
More and more, they are the canaries in the coal mine giving the first notice of failed – sometimes catastrophically so – infrastructure
Since water utilities are monopolies and users cannot turn to other providers, the loss of public trust that violations engender can be profound, lasting decades and creating ripple effects up to the highest levels of an organization or government.

Treating Permit Compliance as a Product

All too often, water utilities see permit compliance as a hurdle they must jump to fulfill their mission: providing clean water efficiently and at a reasonable cost. In the worst-case scenario of breach of public trust, where permit compliance is seen as a hurdle, going around it is a possibility – unless and until caught. The Flint, Michigan water supply crisis happened in large part because the Flint Water Treatment Plant maintained permit despite officials knowing it could not provide safe, clean drinking water.

While clearly Flint Water did not plan for permit compliance as a primary product, too few water utilities do either. What if they did? Would planning a product that everyone depends on start to seem much more positive and predictable than jumping a hurdle or avoiding a punishment? Would it help managers and decision-makers feel more like empowered, responsible adults than guilty children?

For drinking water, wastewater and stormwater, permit compliance is a matter of keeping within standards for a wide range of contaminants (such as metals and harmful bacteria) and indicators of health (such as temperature and pH) – that is, maintaining acceptable quality. So many factors go into that – exogenous ones such as weather events and endogenous ones like infrastructure status. And with climate change, ageing assets and emerging technologies, more new and unexpected factors come into play every day, making planning more challenging than ever. So how can utilities plan for compliance as an end product? All signs point to data as a keystone.

Collecting the Right Data at the Right Time

It is no secret: water supply, wastewater, and stormwater utilities all know what their output is supposed to look like: clean water, which equals compliance. To get there, they need to know what is entering the system and when, what tools they need to use to create compliance, and what their measures of success are indicating – all questions that must be answered by gathering data that passes QA muster. Technology such as new types of sensors and even drones are making possible the collection of critical data in the field that just a few years ago would have been unimaginable, greatly leveraging the ability to gather data about what is coming into the system – typically the greatest challenge to compliance. The right data quality and quantity optimizes data-driven decision-making – which only makes sense to achieve a result (regulatory compliance) that is characterized by data measures.

Making Data More Powerful By Expanding Its Accessibility

A single utility may have dozens of different systems where compliance-critical data is kept, each with protocols and nomenclature known only to staff in specific organization units with highly specialized expertise. It is as if staff working towards the same goals just down the hall from each other were operating on different planets, and the message that only a certain few people – rather than everyone working together – are responsible for compliance.

Achieving consistent compliance rather than reacting to violations requires connecting dots and detecting patterns with a clear “line of sight” across all the organization’s data. But using multiple data storage applications stymies this line of sight, making it much more difficult to spot, investigate and respond to potential problems before they lead to violations.

Decisions are Easier and Better When They are Data-Backed

There is probably no water utility manager out there who never struggled over making a big decision when helpful or critical data was simply not available. Some of the most difficult ones are decisions around money – how much should be planned for future infrastructure, what level and what type of efficiencies should be targeted, how should rates be set? Though the connection may seem indirect, these funding decisions are the foundation to maintaining predictability and steady future compliance – and they are frequently finalized by government legislative bodies with no water utility expertise and a long list of other priorities. Rich data, with its significance put into sharp focus through sound and appropriate analytical tools, gives water utilities the best chance at decisions and their aftermath that will help realize predictability, and permit compliance, for the long-term.

Do you want to improve Environmental Permit Management in your organization? Talk to us and ask for a demo: our team of experts spend time with your team to better understand how you currently manage permit compliance and identify optimization priorities.

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Smart Water Systems: Data and the Future of Water

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Smart water systems empower utilities to provide better service at lower costs, increased effectiveness and efficiency, and with reduced environmental impacts. While ground-breaking data collection and analysis technologies make smart water systems possible, increased pressure on resources from threats like climate change make it necessary. As just one sobering example, the United Nations predicts that about two-thirds of the world’s population — 4.6 billion people — will face water-stressed conditions in the next decade due to increased and completing demands, more extreme climate conditions, and record-shattering weather events.

Using Data To Drive Management

Smart water systems’ critical capability is that they fulfill the promise of data-driven decisions and actions. While water utilities have long gathered extensive data of all sorts, they have all too seldom been able to use it to good effect. It sits siloed in legacy repositories that can’t talk to each other, and it’s all too common for a utility’s disparate units to have no idea what data the others have. And technologies that enable the data to be consolidated and analyzed have been expensive and cumbersome to implement. So the truth and clarity that data should provide have remained out of reach.

In 2017, the Smart Utility Task Force of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA) outlined its vision for the “Digital Utility of the Future” that would exploit data, analytics and integrated systems to meet these aims:

Reduce Operational Costs
Manage and Mitigate Risks
Enhance the Customer Experience
Improve Financial Execution
Optimize Asset Performance and Uncover Hidden Value
Leverage Existing Communications and Computing Platforms
Maximize the Engagement and Efficiency of Employees; and
Integrate Water Quality, Policy, and Performance

What Smart Moves Have Water Utilities Made?

Many public drinking water providers are already using information and communications technology to build smart systems to achieve a sustainable, efficient and clean water supply. As a huge bonus, these innovations let them transform what were formerly “just” ratepayers into allies and partners in conservation, reducing costs, and spotting problems.

To cite just one smart system breakthrough, in 2013 the Kansas City Kansas Board of Public Utilities (KC BPU) implemented Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AIM) for the city’s water supply system that delivers hourly readings in real time of each customer’s water consumption. That’s a lot of raw data that on its own doesn’t make a system smart. But when the data is analyzed to identify consumption patterns and levels that indicate waste due to plumbing leaks, and water department staff quickly contact the customers to let them know, the system becomes smart – new data is collected and used in a new way to prevent waste, lower costs for the provider and customer, decrease stress on the water supply and infrastructure, and forge a bond of cooperation between provider and consumers. Within a few years of the program’s outset, KC BPU had contacted over 1,500 customers – or 2.6% of the utility’s 56,000 households served – with a Residential Leak Alert.

A Smart Step for Wastewater – Reduce Operating Costs

Smart systems are still largely in the future for wastewater treatment utilities, but on-boarding them will be vital to providing service efficiently and protecting the environment.

As a starting point, smart systems can help wastewater utilities resolve some of their “low-hanging fruit” issues like identifying and reducing waste in resource use, thereby reducing operational costs – the first of NACWA’s aims for digital utilities of the future. Some opportunities:

Pumps and blowers generally account for most of the energy usage at treatment plants. By using smart systems to track energy use and performance, inefficiencies can be uncovered and eliminated.
Energy and chemical use in process and disinfection systems can be tracked and compared with industry benchmarks, highlighting additional areas ripe for to tackling inefficiencies and reducing operating costs.
Collection networks conveys wastewater to treatment plants and support community growth and development. But by their nature, these diffuse underground networks are prone to flow problems including waste fat blockages and inflow/infiltration from groundwater and stormwater. While utilities address these problems with programs including ratepayer education and infrastructure replacement, a smart system can identify potential blockage buildups by using flow meters and level sensors. Tracking the resulting data can point field staff to address potential problem areas immediately these areas instead of making field visits based on historical patterns.

The Water and Wastewater sector is confronting growing challenges such as ageing infrastructure, increasing pressure from the regulators and the public and fragmented expenditure allocation. Water utilities now have to step up and go beyond simply complying with the Clean Water Act (CWA.) They need to adopt innovative technologies to improve environmental and regulatory compliance performance, while reducing costs and increasing revenue.

The future digital water utilities will have to be able to capture, synthesize and analyze multiple layers of data to extract key insights. This will require a centralized system focused on cross-functional interoperability to provide for effective decision-making. The utilities’ challenge of how to increase efficiency is ready to be answered by the right advanced technology that will allow them to tackle process automation as well as access to the right data at the right time.

The Klir Water and Wastewater solution provides a single decision-making platform and a 360° view of all Urban Waste Water and Drinking Water missions to help utilities make informed decisions and meet the organization’s strategic objectives.

Are you ready to know more? Request a demo here.

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Blog

6 Keys to Sustainable Permit Management in Water Utilities

min read

Blog

Permit management and more generally environmental compliance are a fundamental corporate goal of a water utility. But also one that is increasingly challenging to achieve, as the data to support this objective is generated across multiple functions and stored in disparate IT systems.A rise in regulations and subsequently in environmental permits in the past few years provide some welcome news for the U.S. water industry, indicating that water safety will likely improve or in some cases remain exemplary. But with more permit applications being submitted, water utilities and municipalities need to stay on top of the inflow to prevent application reviews and related tasks from bottlenecking. Why? Regulations governing a water utility account for the majority of operational effort, which incur a substantial cost. A single day’s delay caused by the regulatory process could potentially result in a costly violation-related fine.

Speeding Up The Permit Management Process

To speed up the permit application and management process, water utilities execs should look to streamlining — removing any regulatory duplication and creating more efficient administrative procedures. As the no.1 stakeholders in most quality and/or compliance departments, analysts should feel empowered to share this concept with the department they work in and encourage them to make their processes more efficient. Streamlining can help ease the pressure on compliance and quality staff and help safeguard the quality and safety of water. If implemented suitably, it makes quality and compliance departments more efficient and effective at enforcing regulations and permitting requirements. And it offers opportunities for the utility to save significantly on operational costs.According to NACWA’s 2017 paper Envisioning the Digital Utility of the Future, streamlining procedures will contribute to phasing out wasteful processes to “enhance efficiency, reduce costs and, ultimately, maximize their return on investment”. It can reduce the amount of time it takes to move permit applications through the regulatory system and help reduce violations, which “benefit the utility by doing more with less and drive down the costs of services to stakeholders. A win-win for all involved”.

Efficiency Gains and Reduction in Violations

A beta version of the Klir platform implemented for Irish Water has enabled them to manage their Urban Waste Water processes systematically and has yielded 20% efficiency gains for the compliance team and a 90% reduction in violations. With benefits like those as a goal, our work with Southern Nevada Water Authority/Las Vegas Valley Water District has allowed us to outline the key areas to prioritize streamlining efforts on:

Cross-functional communication: a highly organized and close-knit system across all teams involved in the permitting process allows for ease in tracking permit applications and reviews. In LVVWD, team members extend outstanding efforts around team communication, and this is enhanced by the teams being in close proximity to each other and running multiple weekly meetings to keep on top of the work-on-hand, eliminating countless emails with questions.
Clearly defined permit application and management process: structured and documented processes – which the teams execute with rigour – is the only way to reduce frustrations and duplicated questions when processing permit applications. Our interaction with various stakeholders revealed a positive culture of ownership and accountability in LVVWD: a number of divisions created processes and ways of working which allow them to do their job successfully. However, these teams remain open to risk as these processes often sit outside an IT system and are heavily dependent on individuals and their commitment to and knowledge of the utility.
Staff qualification and training: regulations change continuously , so it is imperative that compliance and quality staff stay current as regulations are updated.
Status review: it is important for all responsible stakeholders involved to have full visibility on the full permit management process and access to a near real-time tracking of tasks as they move through the review process. Online tracking of permit applications is the most effective of streamlining measures.
Automated task scheduling: a central system that allows for automated tasks scheduling undoubtedly reduces the administrative burden on staff and add efficiency to the application and review process.
Technology: cloud-based software applications, mobile devices, automated workflows and notifications and electronic storage — all can enable noticeable efficiencies of the regulatory compliance process. With the advent of SaaS technologies, affordable solutions now exist for water utilities who need to do more with less.

If investing in technology can be used to streamline the permit management process – permit application processing, tasks scheduling and tracking – it should only come after a careful review of the regulatory compliance process. Indeed, automating a dysfunctional process will only make a dysfunctional process run faster.Streamlining permit management and regulatory processes represents a robust and positive approach for water utilities and municipalities. Implementing regulatory efficiencies can save both time and money while improving water safety. For water utilities, the bottom line is a more robust management of permit application and review, which will set them on the path to better sustainability.Do you want to improve Permit Management in your organization? Talk to us and ask for a demo: our team of experts spends time with your team to better understand how you currently manage permit compliance and identify optimization priorities.

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How to customize formatting for each rich text

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How to customize formatting for each rich text

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How to customize formatting for each rich text

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How to customize formatting for each rich text

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How to customize formatting for each rich text

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What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Blog

The Future of Water Regulations: Exploiting Data Effectively

min read

Blog

Op-Ed by David Lynch, Co-Founder and CEO of Klir

Compliance can often be seen as a production requirement. Instead, it should be seen as the product, and as such, as the core purpose of a water utility. Yet, there is often a disconnect between the spirit of regulations and their practical implementation on the ground. And this often results in an onerous burden on water service providers.

The first iteration of regulations broadly sought to address challenges with obvious links to environmental and human health, i.e. the treatment of drinking water or raw sewerage. In western democracies, these regulations attract bipartisan support, but are implemented in most cases. In Europe, this has culminated in 2000, with one of the most progressive and ambitious pieces of legislation: the Water Framework Directive. At a basic level, the directive takes an epidemiological approach to water management. It looks at what makes the water body ‘sick’ and requires to treat the cause of the illness, rather than the symptoms.

Revision of the Water Framework Directive

The directive is, in itself, relatively simple and short (only 20 pages long). But, the implementation, technical instructions, myriad of daughter legislation, process and reporting requirements often break the links between a water utility’s mission and regulatory requirements. The success of the WFD 18 years after initial implementation is widely debated and a revision of the directive is due in 2019. Nevertheless, the WFD does represent a fundamental shift in what regulation is going to look like over the next 50 years.

Instead of broad legislative measures being sweepingly enforced at a state, multi-state or federal level, regulations will be more pointed. They will be used as a tool to tweak the anthropogenic activities in a catchment to improve a system’s environmental health. This presents significant opportunities for water operators.

For example, if the background level of nutrients in a waterbody in which wastewater is being discharged is already high, logic will follow that the onus of costly treatment will fall on the polluters upstream, rather than solely on the wastewater operators. Of course, today this rarely happens – it is easier to regulate point source than diffuse pollution. So a disproportionate level of the burden falls on operators as the nexus point between multiple water stakeholders.

Data, at the Core of the Challenge

Often, existing legislative framework around the globe already supports a ‘polluter-pays’ principle and with the continuing legislative adoption of approaches like Integrated Catchment Management as well as the WHO Drinking Water Safety Plan this will only continue to be solidified in legislation. But how can water service operators capitalize on this approach? There are many views and silver bullet solutions. But fundamentally, data is at the core of the challenge. AI, Machine Learning as well as evolution of hardware is often touted as the next big thing but without a single source of the truth, the experts cannot use those tools effectively.

Research we carried out recently highlighted that, in a water utility today, the largest proportion of operational cost is labor. 1 in every 2 staff in a utility is impacted by quality, environmental and regulatory workflows. 20 – 50% of the time of those responsible for compliance-related tasks is spent on repetitive work like chasing or maintaining data, executing offline workflows or reacting to requests from regulatory stakeholders.

In order to meet the changing face of water regulations and deploy resources more effectively to meet emerging challenges like Combined Sewage Overflow, Climate Change, Pesticides and supply rationalization, efficiencies need to be gained in how this is managed in water utilities.

Maximum Impact on Human Health and the Environment for a Minimal Investment

By looking at a similar challenge in another vertical, we can see the benefits and pathway to a solution. About 30-35 years ago, sales and marketing were primarily done off Rolodexes. Then, in the early 80s the concept of database marketing was invented. Customer data was managed in lists and spreadsheets to try and qualify the leads. Throughout the 90s and early 2000s, this morphed into systems with rich functionality that tie together multiple functions of a business into a single focused mission, with automation and integration playing a key part. Now when you look at a typical CRM implementation, the return can be as much as 9 times in revenue.

There are a lot of similarities between this and water management. Where CRM focuses on sales, water management solutions focus on what will have the maximum environmental return i.e. what activity will have the maximum impact on human health and the environment for a minimal investment.

Ultimately, a utility needs to manage a pipeline of activities and requests to choose those tasks that have the maximum impact. It is interesting to note that some of these activities can be seen both from a regulated entity and a regulator’s perspective (e.g. permitting industrial discharges to assets). If we look at the water utility today, we are at the database marketing stage: we have structured data but no system to support the full life cycle to complete the sale. SCADA, LIMS, Asset management systems etc. give us plenty of ‘signals’ or ‘leads’, but a systematized process and single source of the truth is required to take those signals through to completion.

Bringing Regulatory Compliance Data Together…

Some utilities have implemented an environmental information management system. These custom-built applications generally run into the multi-million Euro or Dollar Capex cost. They also represent a significant recurrent overhead to keep the systems up and running (although this cost is coming down with cloud technologies).

We worked with Irish Water on an application to manage urban wastewater compliance investigations. To give context, Irish Water was established less than 5 years ago to amalgamate 31 water services authorities into a single state-owned water utility (1,000 Waste Treatment Plants and 900 Drinking Water Plants for a population of c. 3.3million). There was significant non-compliance with both Urban Waste Water and Drinking Water standards. For example, at the start of 2015, 23,297 consumers were on boil water notices. Ireland was also the subject of an Infringement Case by the EC for failure to meet the requirements of the EU Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive.

The application gives a single view of the data so that the compliance management team can understand work on-hand and prioritize tasks based on structured data such as Due Date, Severity, Impact etc. This system also contains extracts of compliance metadata provided in real time by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency. This combined view of compliance data, (i.e. from EPA and Irish Water) gives Irish Water the 360-degree visibility they need to respond to compliance tasks in a timely and efficient manner. The system also provides Irish Water management with the ability to assign work to their colleagues and set due dates against tasks, so that they are in control of the work to carry out.

… and Reaping the Benefits

The results have been impressive. Primary benefits include:

80% reduction in requests for further information from EPA
60% reduction in lead time reporting to regulators
90% reduction in non-compliance due to reporting
Redeployment of 3 full-time employees from compliance and workflow team to address Combined Sewage Overflow projects
But utilities like Irish Water – i.e that can afford these heavy implementations – generally represent less than 0.5% of the market as few have the critical mass to enable a meaningful ROI at this cost.

Meeting Changing Regulatory Patterns

By taking this initial step towards a centralized, systematized single source of environmental truth for their organization, water utilities are improving their data and allowing for rich analysis to meet changing regulatory patterns. Moreover, as this data becomes more centralized and cleansed, challenges can be mounted on permit limits imposed by regulators based on empirical data that there is consensus on.

The future of water regulations is a holistic integrated approach to water management in a catchment or watershed. This requires multiple stakeholders to interact regularly and in real time which is a significant challenge for our industry and those who have a dependency on water services.

In order to address these challenges, a single agreed version of enterprise compliance data as well as the processes that support them will be absolutely necessary to reduce risk, improve efficiency, increase compliance and improve asset investment.

Would like to know more about managing regulatory compliance more effectively? Contact us to see a live demo.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

What’s a Rich Text element?

Static and dynamic content editing

How to customize formatting for each rich text

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Resources

5 Game-Changing Ways AI is Transforming Water Management

Using Better Data to Tackle the Industrial Pretreatment Challenge

Better, Faster, Safer: How New AI Tools Could Transform Water Management for the Better

Introducing Klir Comply with ChatGPT Integration on Microsoft Azure

What’s new?

Leaving Linko Behind: How the City of Tyler Streamlined Pretreatment with Klir

Less Stress, More Certainty: How North Charleston Modernized Pretreatment with Klir

Permitting Without the Panic – How Two Agencies Modernized Their Workflows

Macon Water Authority’s Compliance Makeover – From Paper to Precision

5 Game-Changing Ways AI is Transforming Water Management

Maximizing ROI: The Case for Cloud Over On-Prem

Never Miss a Thing

All Resources

For Oregon’s Clean Water Services, Digital Transformation is About Smarter Watershed Management

Necessity breeds innovation

Then...

And now...

Digital transformation requires culture change

Transform IT into a Digital Solutions team

Start with the basics

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How to Prepare for PFAS (& Avoid a PR Disaster)

PFAS Goes Public

The Price of Waiting

Testing, Treatment, and Transparency

The Benefits of Communicating Proactively on PFAS

Proven practices for PFAS PR

1. Take Credit for Your Work

2. Identify Other PFAS Advocates and Experts

3. Take a Leadership Role

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