Executive Summary

Digitization holds a lot of promise for the future of water, but it also poses a challenge for administrators managing the flood of data coming out of our drinking and wastewater systems.

Spreadsheet overload, ‘too many apps’ and uneven digitization are a big problem, particularly for compliance managers tracking increasingly complicated regulations. Wrangling that data into a workable system is the most important step utilities can take to realize their 20-year digital strategies.

This report builds on interviews with dozens of employees at ten water utilities in the United States, Canada and Australia ranging in size from 20 to 1,000 employees. The utilities did not sponsor the report or pay for inclusion—they were selected because they represent compelling case studies for how software can drive utility management forward.

Showing how getting the ‘basics’ of data management right can unlock previously unrealized operational powers, we look at how organizations like DC Water are leveraging sound data practices to overcome administrative paralysis and build the utility of the future.

Finally, we survey the next 20 years of water utility management, which promises to be shaped by everything from wastewater surveillance, to PFAS, to biosolids, to direct potable reuse (DPR)—each of which will only make getting compliance data under control more important to securing the future of water.

Foreword

As someone at the forefront of moving the needle on the future of water, I’m so excited and encouraged by the perspective and findings surfaced in ‘Building the Utility of the Future.’

There’s an enormous opportunity in our industry for community building and developing a shared understanding of the challenges our sector will face over the next 20 years. I call it an ‘opportunity’ because communicating our goals to groups outside of the water industry—particularly the legislators responsible for funding and signing the future of water into law—is a missing link that is the critical catalyst for change.

We can talk about green infrastructure, business development, and public private partnerships, and bathe ourselves in greenwashing. But until we find ways to communicate our challenges and criteria for success in a way that’s compelling and easy for policymakers to understand, that momentum is not going to happen. Until we clearly articulate the insights powered by integrated data, our sector simply won’t be able to secure the funding and goodwill needed to deploy these technologies on a large scale.

Service providers like Klir are the lynchpin of the solution here, because technology is only one leg of the stool—managing the change of people & process in this new way of working is the prerequisite for success.

It’s not that we are short on data as an industry, rather short of the right access to the right data at the right time with the right volume and quality. Only then can we turn up the heat to articulately demand what is needed to fix the wicked challenges facing water and run a successful utility over the next 20 years.

As it stands now, our industry is fragmented, few of us have a clear and compelling vision for modernization beyond engineering schematics, and most leaders are focused on technical challenges with little appetite for salesmanship or storytelling. We need to be able to connect the dots, legislate certain outcomes, and commit to making decisions about our capital infrastructure for the fiscal year based on sound data.

Cementing these standards will be impossible without a shared understanding of what our utilities must look like in the future. ‘Building the Utility of the Future’ is a crucial step towards that goal, shedding light on the various data management tools and strategies that the world’s largest utilities are using to bring water into the 21st century.

Section 1: Why Compliance Is the Ideal Starting Point for Digital Transformation

Software and the internet have transformed the way we work. Even smaller rural water utilities that lack sophisticated IT systems now use digital tools to communicate, manage tasks and report sampling results to regulators.

There’s just one problem: while other sectors have forged ahead and embraced purpose-built solutions, water utilities have been slow to adopt. It can take decades before a proven technology is considered “mainstream” enough, forcing staff to come up with their own solutions and leading to uneven digitization.

Before Denver Water underwent an IT audit and consolidation six years ago, Chief Operations and Maintenance Officer Tom Roode says the utility had struggled with “too many” point software solutions popping up across the organization for decades.

“For example, Maximo: it got started in one area, say our trades shop, or one treatment plant. And then over a 20 year period people would adopt it at a different treatment plant, or in the pump stations, and it kind of organically grew.”

This “organic” approach to choosing work or asset management software can create problems, especially when the solution your trades shop picks (Maximo) is different from the one your IT department and fleet staff pick (Workfront).

For Compliance Managers who rely on data from virtually every other department to do their jobs, the resulting patchwork of tools is particularly frustrating to work with—worse, even, than the piles of paper that used to clutter their desks.

But there’s a silver lining to the fact that so much data is piling up in our compliance departments: it also makes them the perfect entry point for real, strategic digital transformation initiatives.

Fighting Administrative Paralysis

As new criteria and guidance are constantly revised around issues like PFAS and LSLs, compliance managers find themselves sifting through more data than ever before.

Lacking a dedicated system to manage all of the deadlines, tasks and data her staff were responsible for, one Compliance Manager we spoke with at a mid-sized California utility took matters into her own hands and built an elaborate Excel “cheat sheet”—a monumental task at an organization that had more than 300 construction projects on the go at the time.

Cheat sheets are a popular stopgap at water utilities today, but using a spreadsheet as a database is time consuming, creates a silo around the individual responsible for it, and can be outright dangerous if anything ever slips through the cracks.

“It’s so hard being just one person with all the knowledge,” the Compliance Manager said. “Every project is different because they have different needs. Each project was trying to do it on their own, [but] they didn’t know regulatory compliance. There were knowledge-sharing gaps between departments.”

Data Icebergs

While it’s popular to blame silos, the iceberg might offer an even better analogy for what’s going on at utilities today.

Some crucial data might be visible at the surface, but a vast majority of the most valuable information is below the water line, hidden from view and ready to cause problems.

Icebergs aren’t limited to large organizations either. General Manager Piret Harmon, who manages a team of about 20 people at the Scotts Valley Water District (SVWD), which serves 10,700 customers across 4,200 service connections, routinely finds herself frustrated by data icebergs.

“The water consumption data is here, the water billing data is here, the production data is here, and water quality data is here. And every week there’s another report due, and it’s up to me or another person to sit down again and sort through it all. It’s a very manual process.”

At a large utility responsible for thousands of different permits, that can leave Compliance Managers overloaded by paperwork and constantly firefighting. Any single data point might be buried in:

• Spreadsheets, created by individual personnel and saved locally on their computers
• Outdated printouts kept on file
• Emails saved in an individual’s inbox
• Handwritten log sheets kept onsite
• Customer information systems

“I just couldn’t put my arms all around it, especially at the beginning of the year when it gets busy with permit renewals,” said another Compliance Manager we spoke to.

“I’d have to let our lab managers know, ‘Hey, sorry, my bad. I usually give you two weeks’ notice that I need this data, but I need it tomorrow.’”

#1 Moving Towards Self-Service

Utility customers and workers alike already live in a world filled with internet-enabled self-serve platforms—to consume their media, communicate with colleagues, and order groceries.

As Piret Harmon from SVWD points out, utilities are under increasing pressure to build experiences that are as easy to use and intuitive as the ones we encounter when ordering toilet paper on our smartphones.

“We are trying to actually empower our customers to get more things done without us. For example, why do people have to call us so we can find a piece of paper for them? Why can’t it be like, ‘no, go and browse for it yourself?’”

‍#2 Bracing for the ‘Gray Tsunami’

Water utilities across North America face huge personnel crises as a generation of experienced workers prepare for retirement, with institutional knowledge walking out the door with them.

As workers prepare to retire, it’s more important than ever for utilities to document processes and institutional knowledge so new employees can train for the job properly.

“I’ve got people about to retire, and also recent college grads. I’ve somehow gotta get these people ready for very technical positions very quickly,” one Compliance Manager told us.

#3 Getting New Infrastructure Funded and Built

The less time a compliance department spends chasing down regulatory information, the more time they have to serve internal customers and help them usher large-scale projects through complicated regulatory processes.

“[I want to] be able to better serve our other customers, like Engineering. Having more time to support them as they navigate complicated, sometimes confusing regulations would make their jobs so much easier,” said one Compliance Manager.

“If we could free up some of our time, that would allow us to give them the consultation that they need to navigate new permits for new projects. We could be a better service and have more time to help them navigate all of those regulations.”

#4 Responding to Water Quality Issues Quickly and Building Trust

When customers’ water quality is threatened and regulatory bodies are demanding up-to-date information, time is of the essence.

“We’re just beginning to dive into the world of letting customers report with web mapping applications,” says Adam McKnight, a former analyst with Halifax Water.

In the event of a water main break, rather than solely relying on calls from customers, McKnight’s department has given residents the ability to file their own reports online. It’s faster and more efficient than before.

“They pin the dropper point on the map, and we can go out and we can investigate,” says McKnight. “That becomes a part of our water main break response. That’s one emergency situation where it’s really beneficial having all the data right there.”

#5 Bringing Utility Management Into the 21st Century

Overstretched Compliance Managers might have it the worst when it comes to administrative overload, but important data is pooling across every department.

A single large wastewater treatment plant (0.8-3 million population served) can generate upwards of 30,000 data points, most of which pile up in data graveyards: employee hard drives, OneDrive, the utility’s servers, etc.

When managers look out across their organizations today, they see the tops of numerous icebergs with no way of knowing what’s underneath.

To move forward with some of the more exciting innovations in water technology like AI and predictive analytics, large utilities will need to do the hard work of taming these icebergs with a sound data management strategy. And developing objective metrics for utility performance will be crucial as utilities approach state and federal governments for more funding.

Section 2: From Asset to Event Management: Turning Software Into an Essential Operations and Maintenance Tool

Operations and maintenance leaders at water utilities are faced with a seemingly impossible task: maintain massive, complex and at times century-old drinking, waste and stormwater infrastructure, often with limited resources and a shoestring budget.

In many cases infrastructure is breaking down faster than it’s being renewed, while economic and population growth puts further stress on existing systems, leading to frustrating situations for utility leaders.

As Piret Harmon from SVWD puts it, “Why are you building if you’re asking me to conserve? How is that even in the same sentence?”

With a problem so deeply rooted in physical infrastructure and engineering challenges, taming a utility’s data might not be the first solution that comes to the minds of utility leaders.

That is until you look at the way leading utilities like DC Water are managing their data—not just to cut down on administrative work, but to make the job of the operator easier, drive real change in their physical systems, and anticipate and fix asset risks before they become asset disasters.

The Typical Utility ‘Stack’

In addition to operating one of the world’s most advanced wastewater treatment plants at Blue Plains, DC Water has made significant strides in bringing all of their work into the digital sphere properly.

The utility has methodically built and adopted systems to help it decrease administrative workload, create processes that are more self-serve, and lay the groundwork for more sophisticated technologies like predictive analytics.

Like many similarly-sized utilities, DC Water sorts its systems into three general buckets:

1. Its Core Underlying Systems that manage assets and track internal work using IBM Maximo and ArcGIS, as well as payroll and finance which is handled by Oracle.
2. Its Customer Information Systems, through which it manages 130,000 metered connections.
3. Its Third Party Portal, nicknamed the ‘Plumber Portal,’ a collection of contractor-facing applications through which the utility manages programs like Backflow Inspections and Grease Abatement.

Getting as many contractors, employees and customers plugged into and using this system has been a big priority for DC Water’s IT lead Tom Kuczynski—and a big achievement.

While DC Water’s shiny, futuristic HQO headquarters has a mailroom, it might not need one for long: 70,000 of the utility’s customers have signed up for online accounts, and about 50,000 currently receive an e-bill.

Thanks to the ‘Report a Problem’ app, customers can submit issues online even if they don’t have an online account.

Dispatching plumbers for inspections is also now an entirely digital process handled through the Plumber Portal, which automatically generates and sends work orders to Maximo.

“It’s a lot more efficient for us to manage any information, and it integrates better with our core systems. So if you need a meter installed or a service connection completed, you can send us requests that automatically generate a work order in our system,” says Kuczynski.

At-A-Glance: Utilities Featured in the Report

The Disaster Response Challenge

DC Water’s IT systems faced a new challenge in September of 2021 when Northeastern DC experienced a “microburst”—an extreme climate-change fuelled weather event concentrated in one area.

“It didn’t rain at all here [in the south], but we had six inches of rain in northeast DC that caused major flooding in the area,” recalls Kuczynski.

The utility’s 24/7 helpline and ‘Report a Problem’ apps immediately lit up as numerous customers’ homes flooded during the microburst, and DC Water’s crews had to respond quickly.

Suddenly there were three groups of people sitting in three different locations who had to work closely together:

1. The pumping operations crew who sit in the pumping station right outside of HQO and run the sewer system.
2. The plant workers four and a half miles away at Blue Plains WWTP, where all of the water pumped through the system eventually ends up.
3. The customer service crews on the third floor of HQO who monitor the help line and dispatch crews.

Communication between the three groups became tricky when multiple work orders were generated for the same neighborhood or geographical area.

All three would have to rely on a fourth party, the foreman in that area, to know that those work orders were all related to the same problem and avoid sending multiple crews.

“We didn’t really have a comprehensive understanding of what was really happening across our physical collection system and our customer system: none of those systems talked to each other back before September. We needed a better way to manage that event in a more comprehensive way,” says Kuczynski.

Enter the Events Management System

Working with a local vendor, DC Water set out to build an application that would knit the information in its Core Systems and Customer Systems together into one seamless, real-time emergency response dashboard.

The result was the Events Management System, an award-winning dashboard-based application that gave operators sitting in the DC Water war room access to:

Real-time feeds that they can use to monitor the severity of an incident.

An incident tracking tool that integrated with the utility’s call center and customer information system.

Information about all crews and vehicles in the field, making it easier to allocate resources to an event quickly.

“This one pane of glass now gives you all of that information in a single view,” says Kuczynski. In the event of another microburst, crews could be dispatched and managed seamlessly using a single user interface.

“So they can say, ‘These five work orders and incidents can all go to one crew.’ And they circle and drag them (on screen) to create a work order. They can literally do what they did before in seconds compared to minutes.”

In an emergency situation where five new calls might come in by the time you’re done attending to one, that’s a game changer.

Proactive Utility Management in Action

DC Water’s experience with the EMS is a concrete example of how sound data management and connecting disparate data sets can unlock new levels of efficiency, responsiveness and insight at a water utility.

It shows how there’s a direct line between the less glamorous aspects of digital transformation—pushing customers to sign up for online accounts and building a reliable customer database, for example—and the more exciting, transformational technologies like the EMS.

Take Pipe Sleuth, another application DC Water built with an external vendor, which uses neural networks and advanced image processing to analyze photos of pipes to grade them based on condition and report potential pipeline defects.

Kuczynski says the ability to better predict main breaks could be a game changer for the utility, from both a service and a cost standpoint.

“You eliminate service interruptions to customers, you eliminate street closures, but you also reduce the cost of a repair—$50,000 for a small break vs. up to $1,500,000 to fix a 36- inch transmission main.”

Section 3: Using Better Data To Tackle The Resource Recovery Challenge

Getting rid of data icebergs and leveraging compliance and operational data for insights will be crucial for bringing utilities into the digital age properly. But how does better data management fit into the broader transformation that’s going on at water utilities today?

Let’s stick with the DC Water example a bit longer. Their push to squeeze every last bit of value out of every asset there hasn’t stopped with faster emergency response times.

Blue Drop, a nonprofit LLC spun out of DC Water in 2016 and lead by Kuczynski, has recently started generating revenue by renting out the utility’s headquarters for events, leasing surplus cell tower space, licensing its EMS and PipeSleuth software to other utilities, and selling a Class A biosolids fertilizer product called Bloom.

“You can’t keep raising prices, right? There gets to be a point in time where the cost of service exceeds the ability of the customers to pay. So you’ve got to figure out ways to do it better, faster, cheaper,” says Kuczinski.

It’s an unavoidable fact that most utilities are going to have to start looking for additional cost savings and sources of revenue to offset rate increases. For most, that means aggressively pursuing resource recovery: the process of extracting and recycling as much of what passes through a wastewater system as possible.

Better Biosolids With Better Data

Disposing waste sludge is an expensive process, and getting better at biosolids—by reducing the amount of biosolids that are thrown out and increasing the amount of Class A material that can be sold—is a huge cost-saving and revenue opportunity for utilities.

According to Urban Utilities General Manager of Resource Recovery Peter Donaghy, mapping out our water and wastewater systems and developing a better understanding of how they work using better data is one of the most effective methods we have to improve the biosolids process.

His team recently used real-time analytics to discover that the way effluent moves through the system’s pumping stations could affect biosolids quality. As they worked through the biosolids system with a fine-toothed comb, they realized sewer network operators could have a massive role in biosolids quality.

“As soon as we saw [a contaminant] coming in at the head of a treatment plant, there were a certain number of pump stations we could inhibit that could slow that process and give us time to react.”

By allowing the pumping station to slowly fill up, Donaghy’s team could buy themselves an hour or two to send a worker to that pump station to test it for undesirable effluent and potentially stave off contamination.

“Inhibiting a pump station is not something you’d think is part of managing biosolids, it’s way off in the network. Some of the guys managing those pump stations wouldn’t even know what biosolids are.”

Direct Potable Reuse: The ‘Holy Grail’ of Resource Recovery

While generating additional revenue from a utility’s assets and recycling biosolids waste is a step in the right direction, recycled water continues to loom on the horizon as the biggest resource recovery prize.

Less than a fraction of a percent of all of our wastewater is ‘officially’ recycled back into the drinking water system today. But cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Washington D.C. already draw their drinking water downstream from wastewater treatment plants.

In fact, of the 32 billion gallons of wastewater discharge the U.S. produces every day, the National Research Council estimates that up to 20 billion might already be re-entering drinking sources downstream.

And as utilities in Colorado, Florida and California take concrete steps towards implementing direct potable reuse (DPR) technologies and new research suggests that treated water might be cleaner than conventional sources, recycled drinking water will play an increasingly large role in the future of water.

Take Los Angeles Sanitation’s ‘Hyperion 2035’ plan, which aims to transform its Hyperion Wastewater Treatment Plant—one of the largest in North America—into a fully DPR operation by 2035.

Hyperion is a colossal 144-acre facility, with a sprawling network of streets that officials often describe as a city unto itself. To move to DPR, close to half of the existing footprint of the plant will need to be rebuilt or overhauled in some way with a raft of technologies like microfiltration and ultrafiltration, new biological processes and reverse osmosis.

But to hear LA Sanitation officials describe it, Hyperion 2035 is just as much about new treatment technologies and engineering challenges as it is about building (and in some cases, rebuilding) trust in recycled drinking water.

DPR’s Compliance Challenge

As utilities pursue DPR, the legacy of anti-potable reuse sentiment and California’s doomed efforts to start introducing DPR in the 1990s looms large in the minds of utility leaders and regulators.

It’s clear that the margin for error with DPR will be razor-thin, and building confidence in water quality and compliance data will be more important for DPR projects than it ever was for traditional water and wastewater utilities.

“The whole issue of public confidence is that very, very fragile link that keeps the system going. That’s something we are very aware of and try very hard to maintain,” says Pierre van Rensburg, strategic executive for urban and transport planning at Windhoek, Namibia.

That city built the world’s first DPR plant in 1968, which today produces purified water for the city’s 400,000 residents. Van Rensburg says that no illness has ever been directly linked to its operations in the decades since its opening.

“I think if there is ever one incident that could be linked back to the plant, the public would lose all confidence and simply refuse to use water from that source and that would severely taint our supply options.”

Conclusion

The Future of Water is Compliance

So what does this all mean for utilities? Firstly, it confirms something we’ve suspected for a long time at Klir: that many water utilities are struggling with digitization ‘basics,’ and they won’t be able to move forward with their ambitious 20 year strategies before they get them right.

As EPA and states make big strides to tackle issues like PFAS, LSLs, drought and increasing pressure on water systems, keeping up with regulations is only going to become a more burdensome process using existing tools.

At the same time, as utilities pursue efficiencies and more ambitious resource recovery projects while recycling or reclaiming more of their water, trust in the integrity of their data is only going to become more important, not less.

So how can utilities decrease the margin of error and build trust in their data? It all comes back to those ‘basics:’ building a single source of truth for regulatory data, breaking down icebergs and building certainty around a utility’s compliance data.

Wrangling water quality and permit data into a workable system and empowering Compliance Managers with better software tools might seem like a purely administrative challenge today. But it could very well turn out to be the single most important step utilities take in their digital transformation journey.

“If we needed to find something, we had to dig through thousands of pages—and if it wasn’t where it was supposed to be, we were in trouble.”
– A.J. Hopkins

After an audit flagged missing documentation, Macon turned to Klir for a centralized, digital solution.

From Paper Overload to a Digital-First Approach

For years, Macon’s compliance program relied on manual processes, making it difficult to access key documents and stay ahead of deadlines. In 2022, an audit from Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division (EPD) highlighted the risks of missing documentation. The message was clear—without a better system, they faced potential fines, which could have cost the same as a year with Klir, and compliance failures.

Macon chose Klir for its ability to centralize all compliance data, eliminate manual tracking, and provide real-time visibility into reports and deadlines. The platform offered unlimited user access, strong security protections, and the flexibility to scale beyond industrial pretreatment into drinking water and wastewater.

A Smooth Transition to Klir

Moving from binders to a digital system can seem overwhelming, but Macon’s onboarding process with Klir was structured, hands-on, and highly supported. Over six months, the Klir team worked closely with A.J. and his staff to digitize records, standardize workflows, and configure the platform to their needs.

“It felt like Klir was auditing our program from top to bottom—which turned out to be a huge benefit. We finally had clarity on everything we had and what was missing.”
‍– A.J. Hopkins

Despite staffing changes and unexpected extreme weather delays, the transition remained steady and manageable, giving Macon full control over the pace of implementation.

Results: More Confidence, Less Chaos

Since implementing Klir, Macon has eliminated the stress of tracking compliance manually.

Records are now searchable in seconds, removing the last-minute panic of audits. Automatic reminders ensure that deadlines are never missed. Compliance confidence, which was once shaky, jumped from a 5 out of 10 to a 9 or 10 out of 10.

“We used to lose sleep over whether we had the right information. Now, we know we’re covered.”
– A.J. Hopkins

Looking ahead, Macon is eager to take advantage of Boots, Klir’s AI-powered assistant, which will allow them to find answers instantly—without searching through spreadsheets or emails.

“If someone asks me for a report, I won’t have to dig through a binder or open 15 spreadsheets—I’ll just ask Boots.”
– A.J. Hopkins

Final Takeaway

For utilities still buried in paper, struggling with spreadsheets, and worried about missing critical information, digital transformation is no longer optional.

“If you’re tired of chasing paperwork, if managing records feels stressful and chaotic, if you’re worried about missing something—it’s time to go digital. Klir has completely changed how we work.”
– A.J. Hopkins

Want to hear the full conversation? Watch the webinar recording to see how Macon Water Authority built a more efficient, reliable program with Klir.

Contact us at hello@klir.com to learn how your utility can move from paper to precision.

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"One of the difficulties with diving into the digital world is that you end up having an app for this, and then an app for that. The fact that Klir had so many different modules that can talk and communicate with each other was really appealing to us. Users don't have to learn eight different applications: ideally they're only going to know the SCADA system and Klir."

– Adam McKnight, Data Analyst at Halifax Regional Water Commission

‍As Data Analyst for the Halifax Regional Water Commission's Water Quality Programs, Adam McKnight has a privileged vantage point over Nova Scotia's largest water system.

Serving a population of more than 350,000 in the Halifax Regional Municipality, the utility manages 8 water supply plants, 14 wastewater treatment facilities and more than 1,500 kilometers of water mains in Canada’s second-fastest growing municipality, all of which must be constantly monitored for compliance through a rigorous sampling program." A lot of the time, compliance data drives our operational decision making. If we're reporting a number to a regulator, we need to make sure that we're doing what we need to do operationally to meet those targets," points out McKnight.

But getting those thousands of data points in front of the right people can be a challenge, especially when you consider the patchwork of offline and online systems that water workers like McKnight have to navigate. That’s why Halifax Water set out to transform the way it manages its water data, merging multiple data sources and processes into a single collaborative platform and paving the way for a more proactive, collaborative and resilient water data management program.

More Data, More Challenges

When Halifax Water first considered implementing Klir to manage its compliance data in 2020, it had already spent decades using software tools to transition away from paper and binder-based recordkeeping and do more with their existing data. But while compliance-specific web tools had helped Halifax Water take one step into a digital future, as the utility grew and the number of different people and departments using those tools increased, the utility’s data management system became increasingly strained. "We focused on getting drinking water data into the digital realm, then we expanded on that and incorporated wastewater compliance and sampling, then we added more research-based groups." The result was a work process that, from a data and reporting perspective, was unsustainable in a few ways:

• Sampling data remained difficult to access, living "either in physical log sheets at the treatment facilities, digital spreadsheets, or in the time series data management system that stores our SCADA data. Having data in so many locations and formats makes it really difficult to pull the data together for comparison and analysis, especially when it is needed quickly."
• Spreadsheets were being used as databases, creating data opacity and discouraging proactive data management.
• Even when users could get data in and out of the system, it wasn’t built for collaboration and often became disorganized with too many hands in the pot.

"We didn't really have a solid water quality data governance or structure. It was kind of a free for all, which led to a lot of challenges,” says McKnight.

Implementing a New Approach to Water Data Management

It became clear that Halifax Water would need to adopt a new approach to water quality data management—one that took the patchwork of tools it had depended on in the past and turned it into one truly integrated system. To do that, the utility turned to Klir, an operating system (OS) for water management that integrates compliance, sampling and all other aspects of water and wastewater data management into one integrated, centralized and easy to use system.

Presented with the opportunity to switch to Klir, McKnight says it didn’t make sense not to make the jump. “We have all of this operational data, we have all of this compliance data—it didn't make sense not to have that data be brought together. ”With the help of Klir and a renewed commitment to the One Utility, One Platform approach, Halifax Water aims to:

1. Maintain High Quality Drinking Water

Klir dovetailed with a longstanding desire at Halifax Water to do more with data and move from reactive problem solving to an approach whereby compliance personnel, operators and engineers worked proactively to mitigate drinking water and wastewater issues. "Over the last three years we’ve been trying to look at our compliance data as early as possible, especially when data is beginning to trend differently. We began by getting our compliance inspectors to send us emails when they're noticing things in the distribution systems or at treatment facilities when data is outside normal thresholds."

Klir presented McKnight’s department with the opportunity to see the bigger compliance picture, notice trends before they become problems, and make sure the right people have access to the right data at the right time. "That way, we're able to get ahead of things and maintain high quality drinking water."

2. Decrease Dependence on Individuals

The complicated routines of a water sampling program as large as Halifax Water’s will often live, to some extent, inside the desk drawer or head of a single employee. That can create problems if that information—or person—ever goes missing.

"That's a lot to put on one person,” points out McKnight. “And if that one person leaves, you're stuck."

Klir gave Halifax the ability to offload that information into a universally-accessible system, decreasing dependence on individuals and building a system that was more resilient, more secure and less prone to information loss.

3. Centralize Compliance Data and Cut Down on Data Chasing

Larger utilities like Halifax Water often struggle to maintain a single set of compliance data, which can sometimes lead to confusion or even overlapping, contradictory information about water and wastewater quality.

"Sometimes data used in reporting is calculated from a combination of compliance and operational sampling program data. However, confusion can result when datasets unintentionally referenced are not the authoritative source of the information and have become outdated. We need one single source of truth, where people know they can go to reference authoritative data at any time.”

Linking and centralizing compliance, monitoring, research, operational and other data together to create a single source of truth provides Halifax Water’s users with a new level of decision-making confidence, allowing operators and staff preparing reports to have a full and clear picture of what is actually going on in the utility.

4. Use Fewer Apps to Build a More Efficient, Secure System

It’s not uncommon today for operators, engineers and compliance professionals at large utilities to use separate tools for compliance reporting, sampling, pretreatment and FOG, backflow prevention & cross-connection control.McKnight says that can become a frustrating challenge for a utility trying to build a system that works, and is also precisely why Halifax Water chose Klir.

“The fact that Klir had so many different modules that can talk and communicate with each other was really appealing to us. Users don't have to learn eight different applications: ideally they're only going to know the SCADA system and Klir."

McKnight says that in addition to reducing the time Halifax Water spends training new users, it also allows the utility to avoid situations where someone leaves the company and takes access to and familiarity with an app with them.

“From an auditing perspective that can be a huge red flag. If you're only using a handful of applications, that's a lot easier from a security perspective."

5. Break Down Departmental Silos and Promote Collaboration

Halifax Water made a multi-year commitment to become a “One Water” operation, integrating stormwater, wastewater and drinking water into one seamless system.

“Our big objective is to break down silos and have more communication between the different business units, departments and divisions. Alongside that, internally we've also [adopted] the slogan of ‘one water, one data.’ Those two goals really go hand in hand.”

Klir has helped accelerate that transformation within Halifax Water, helping form bridges between different groups within the utility, giving all user groups easy access to water quality data, and helping decision makers at the utility get on the same page when it comes time to problem-solve.

“It only helps make us stronger, because we're going to be working together and everyone has a common goal rather than feeling like there's different groups that are working against each other."

One Water, One Data

With Klir, Halifax Water foresees making serious progress on its goals to encourage interdepartmental collaboration as a One Water utility, set the stage for further data integration in the near future, as well as:

• Adopting a proactive approach to problem solving, helping it maintain water of high quality for its customers and the environment.
• Decrease dependence on individuals, reducing the risk of information loss.
• Create a single source of truth, avoiding overlapping or contradictory reporting and streamlining the compliance process as a whole. 
• Use fewer apps to build a system that is easier to use, takes less training time to master, and is better prepared from an audit and security perspective.
• Break down departmental silos and promote collaboration, allowing the utility to deliver on its One Water, One Data vision.

Bring a 'One Water' Approach to Your Utility

Klir is a single, unified operating system for water, pulling every aspect of wastewater management—including compliance, sampling and more—into an easy to use dashboard. Learn more about how Klir can cut down on administration and record-keeping work, create new opportunities for collaboration, and provide a level of system-wide visibility unmatched by other water data management systems.

With growing regulatory demands, aging infrastructure, and staff turnover, permitting has become one of the most complex (and risky) responsibilities in water management. For Lisa Haney (Orange County Water District) and Greg Buncab (Contra Costa Water District), the solution wasn’t more spreadsheets, it was clarity, structure, and a single source of truth.

“Before Klir, I was surrounded by Post-it notes, Word docs, Excel tabs—and I was the only one who knew where anything was.”
‍
– Greg Buncab, Environmental Compliance Officer, CCWD

From Manual Chaos to Structured Collaboration

Like many utilities, both OCWD and CCWD were dealing with permitting programs spread across systems - and people’s memories. Lisa had 600+ easement permits tracked in one massive Excel sheet. Greg inherited an entire compliance program with no documentation from his predecessor. Information lived in inboxes, desktops, and (more often than not) sticky notes.

Klir offered a new path:

• A centralized hub for permits, programs, and tasks
• Cross-department collaboration with clear visibility
• Automatic reminders, audit trails, and historic context
• A foundation for future AI adoption

“I probably had 20 people a day asking me where something was. That was my whole day. Now they just find it themselves."

‍– Lisa Haney, Executive Director of Planning & Natural Resources, OCWD

Beyond Permitting – A Place for Organizational Memory

Both agencies quickly saw that what started with permitting could extend further. Greg expanded Klir to track pressure vessels, land use agreements, and safety checklists. Lisa’s team added hydrology, easements, and even institutional knowledge - so future staff wouldn’t have to rebuild from scratch after retirements.

“We’re using Klir to train new employees. What used to take a year now takes a few weeks."

‍– Lisa Haney, Executive Director of Planning & Natural Resources, OCWD

Results: Transparency, Teamwork, and Peace of Mind

With Klir in place, deadlines are met, documents are easy to find, and cross-team coordination is far simpler. Lisa can reallocate tasks for better workload balance. Greg can sleep without wondering what he forgot.

“Now when someone asks why we do something, I don’t have to explain - I can show them the regulator’s email."

‍– Greg Buncab, Environmental Compliance Officer, CCWD

Looking Ahead

Both agencies are now exploring how Klir can support digital transformation, from AI-driven insights to reporting automation.

“We want centralized data so we can move into AI. You can’t build intelligence without structure - and Klir gives us that foundation."

‍– Lisa Haney, Executive Director of Planning & Natural Resources, OCWD

Final Takeaway

If you’re still managing permits in spreadsheets or worried about losing institutional knowledge, now’s the time to rethink your approach.

“Anything with a due date, a risk, or a program behind it - put it in Klir. It’s been a game-changer."

‍– Greg Buncab

Want to hear the full conversation? Watch the recording to see how OCWD and CCWD are building smarter, more resilient operations with Klir.

Industrial pretreatment programs are under pressure. More industries, tighter regulations, and fewer staff hours mean the risk of missed samples, violations, or incomplete records is higher than ever. For Joshua Earley, Industrial Pretreatment Specialist at North Charleston Sewer District, the old way of managing pretreatment just wasn’t cutting it.

‍“The former software was basically just a place to plug in numbers. It didn’t really tell us anything — no trends, no red flags, nothing to help us act before problems escalated.”
‍
– Joshua Earley, NCSD

From Reactive to Proactive

Before Klir, Joshua’s team spent hours re-checking data to ensure nothing slipped through. Today, Klir flags violations, highlights repeated results, and even alerts him in real time when something’s off.

“What used to take me three hours — entering 44 sets of data — now takes 45 minutes in Klir. It’s a huge time saver and far less stress.”

‍– Joshua Earley

As part of implementation, Klir migrated 50–60 customer profiles and historical data, so Joshua’s team started with a clean, complete foundation. With monitoring, inspections, permits, and communications centralized in one secure platform, he can spend less time wrestling with spreadsheets and more time in the field working with industries to improve treatment processes.

‍ROI That Speaks Volumes‍

With Klir, the benefits go far beyond time savings. An ROI study with North Charleston showed a 13X return: for every $1 invested, the utility gained $13 back through faster processes, avoided violations, and reduced risk.

Early ROI analysis also found that the district recaptured 10% of staff time previously lost to manual mayhem — time that can now be reinvested in higher-value work.

“Saving time gives me more time to go out in the field, interact with industries, and help them improve their treatment. It helps the whole system get to where we need to be.”

– Joshua Earley

Audit-Ready, Without the Stress

Audits used to be a source of anxiety, with staff spending weeks double-checking spreadsheets and piecing together records. With Klir, everything is already in order — violations flagged, tasks tracked, communications logged. When inspectors arrive, Joshua’s team can show their program is under control in just a few clicks.

“If we miss a violation, the blame falls on us. Klir makes sure nothing slips through the cracks.”

– Joshua Earley

‍A Faster Path to Operational Data

For North Charleston, onboarding took about four to five months, but Joshua emphasized how closely Klir worked with him to migrate data and get the system running smoothly. Since then, Klir has streamlined the process even further, meaning today’s utilities can be up and running much faster.

Why It Matters for Pretreatment Programs Everywhere

For North Charleston, Klir turned pretreatment from a source of stress into a program that runs smoothly, saves time, and stays audit-ready. The same transformation is possible for any utility: fewer spreadsheets, fewer risks, and more confidence in front of regulators.

Joshua’s story is proof: less time in spreadsheets means more certainty, more visibility, and more impact.

Ready to see what digital pretreatment looks like?

👉 Watch the webinar on demand or book a demo to explore how Klir can modernize your program.

The Cost of Sticking with Legacy Systems

The City of Tyler operates a small pretreatment program with a lean team responsible for protecting local water quality and ensuring compliance with industrial users. Like many utilities, the team had been using Linko, a long-standing software for inspection scheduling, sampling, and reporting.

But over time, Linko became more of a hindrance than a help. Data access was limited. Workflows were unintuitive. Connectivity issues slowed down routine tasks. And most importantly, the system couldn’t support upcoming electronic submission requirements from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ).

“We needed to prepare to submit electronically for the TCEQ, and Linko would not have done anything for that.”
‍
— Sarah Elkins, Pretreatment Coordinator, City of Tyler

The team needed more than a software patch - they needed a system that could grow with them.

Preparing for the Future: Why Klir

The City of Tyler selected Klir to replace Linko. Klir’s operational data management hub would modernize its pretreatment program and give staff the ability to manage the entire program in one place. The decision was guided by a few key priorities:

• Centralize Pretreatment Data: Eliminate scattered spreadsheets and limited-access folders
• Improve Visibility Across the Team: Make it easy for staff to log in, find information, and act on it
• Streamline Workflows: Simplify inspections, sampling, task management, and reporting
• Enable Electronic Submissions: Prepare for TCEQ’s requirements without needing additional systems.

From Migration to Adoption

Transitioning off Linko was a critical moment for the team at City of Tyler, but it didn’t have to be a painful one. 

The process began with a clean export of data from Linko. From there, Klir’s onboarding and implimentation team worked with Sarah and her team to map, validate, and upload the data into Klir. Unlike other transitions, this one didn’t require costly consultants or downtime.

Once in Klir, the program was restructured to fit how Tyler actually works - aligning workflows to TCEQ requirements and internal processes. As Elkins noted, the difference was clear immediately:

“Now we’re able to just log on and see what we need, versus not having access for the broader team and limited data visibility with the previous tool.”

Making Pretreatment Easier and More Effective

In the months following the transition, the City of Tyler began to see measurable results, not just in terms of time saved, but in overall program effectiveness.

Operational Efficiency

• 20% time savings compared to previous workflows in Linko
• Staff now spend less time navigating systems and more time taking action

Transparency & Accountability

• All team members have access to real-time pretreatment data
• Managers can easily check task progress and ensure follow-through

Performance & Compliance

• 100% of inspections completed on time
• 100% of monitoring requirements met with results imported monthly
• SNC reports generated directly from Klir, without needing external support

Peace of Mind

• Reduced risk of missed deadlines or lost data
• Confidence that the system supports both routine work and regulatory shifts

Build a Modern Pretreatment Program

For small teams managing high-stakes programs, the right operational data hub can make all the difference. Klir helped the City of Tyler move away from legacy frustrations and toward a modern, unified way of working, improving day-to-day operations and preparing for long-term change.

Whether you’re trying to simplify reporting, prepare for digital submissions, or just gain better visibility into your data, the City of Tyler’s story shows that transitioning off Linko is not only possible - it’s worth it.

At Klir, we’re always improving! Since onboarding the City of Tyler, Klir has implemented a new way of getting data into Klir from Linko, that takes less than one day. 

Serving Southern Nevada and the world famous Las Vegas strip, the Southern Nevada Water Authority provides potable water to 2.3 million residents and 40 million annual tourists.

With a mandate to be the world’s most efficient drinking water utility, the SNWA relies on Klir to be more proactive and efficient when it comes to permit and Safe Drinking Water Act compliance.

“Being in compliance is extremely important. But being able to demonstrate that in an effective and efficient way is where this tool really takes our compliance perspective to the next level,” says Dave Johnson, Deputy General Manager of Operations at the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the Las Vegas Valley Water District. “The Klir application helps us to sleep better at night knowing that we can demonstrate that compliance.”

The Challenge

As a public utility, the SNWA has no room for error when it comes to permit compliance and utility operations.

With thousands of permits spread across the organization in different departments and different divisions, and 300,000 samples required annually to comply with the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), the SNWA set out to identify a technology that would allow it to bring all of its permit tracking and sampling monitoring together into one location.

“We have a big responsibility to the community, and that is to ensure a safe and secure drinking water system. Klir provides us a tool to make sure that our water is safe and secure,” says Frank Milligan, Director, Environmental Health & Safety & Corporate Security at the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the Las Vegas Valley Water District.

The Solution

• Klir provides peace of mind for management with complete visibility into the utility’s live status of compliance.
• Centralizing 1000+ regulatory permits into a single dashboard eliminates information silos.
• SNWA analyzes over 300,000 water quality samples every year. Klir provides a tool to track and manage that sampling data, allowing the SNWA to ensure its in compliance and meeting ratepayers’ expectations each day.
• With time saved on compliance admin, staff time can be redirected towards high-value proactive work.

The Impact

The Klir drinking water management platform allows SNWA to consolidate and manage all of its 1000+ permits and 300,000+ water samples in one place.

• With a single software system to consolidate all of its permits and Safe Drinking Water Act sampling outcomes, the SNWA can deliver compliance more efficiently.
• Management has complete visibility into the organization’s real-time compliance position, all within a single dashboard.
• Permits are kept current and legal with no deadlines missed.
• Staff time that would otherwise be spent on administrative tasks can be redirected to high value work such as conducting inspections, or hazard abatement action.

“The real value proposition in the Klir software is that it allows us to become much more efficient in how we deal with these massive amounts of data.”

– Dave Johnson, Deputy General Manager of Operations at SNWA and LVVWD

How Klir Can Help

Klir is a single, unified operating system for water, pulling every aspect of water management—including compliance, sampling, permitting and more—into an easy to use dashboard.

Learn more about how Klir can cut down on administration and record-keeping work, create new opportunities for collaboration, and provide system-wide visibility into your water system.

“I don’t think there is anything out there like Klir.”

‍—Keith Abercrombie, Chief Operating Officer at Santa Clarita Valley Water

At A Glance

• As SCV Water amalgamated three water divisions under one agency, Klir supported a seamless operational transition by organizing over 150 permits into a single collaborative dashboard.
• Complete visibility for management into live status of all permits has eliminated all risk associated with specific employees holding permitting information.
• With permitting tasks fully managed through Klir, no deadlines are missed.

The Challenge​

In 2018, Santa Clarita Valley Water (SCV Water) was managing a massive organizational shift—amalgamating three separate water divisions into one.Among the many hurdles that Chief Operating Officer Keith Abercrombie and his team were facing: the complex task of understanding which permits were being maintained across the three divisions.With an aging workforce (80% of which is over 50) and a few key team members set to retire in the coming years, Keith and his team were driven to look for a new way to handle their permits.In the old system, everyone knew who was responsible for managing a specific permit, but a change in the overall structure meant a change in responsibilities for many employees.Each permit had requirements to fulfill for a key regulatory body, and not reporting or complying would mean that the utility could be subject to a fine or penalty—which in many cases could be quite material.Without the support of a central permitting database, and with the recent increase in permit quantity and complexity, there was simply too much risk.

The Solution

Keith and the team at SCV Water turned to Klir to pull together and help coordinate permitting information for the newly-amalgamated team.

The Klir permit management solution takes the risk of managing and complying with permits out of the individual’s hands by centralizing this information andautomating the tasks and activities needed to comply across the organization.“Klir has helped us manage and track permits and to be in a position that we are comfortable in knowing exactly what we are doing with our permits. We are not at the risk of screw ups, which can be embarrassing and costly,” says Keith.With permits across the organization now managed in Klir:

• Contributors can easily keep track of deadlines and activities with automatic triggers and alerts
• All data and requirements for 150+ permits are gathered into one permit management system
• Employees can continue to work the exact same way as before because the Klir system builds onto existing systems and processes

“Some staff, like supervisors, worry that they could miss a deadline. Having the ability for software to tee up the events in advance, and not just for the person whose responsibility it is, but for someone else in case they are out, gives us peace of mind,” says Abercrombie.

The Impact

With a single source of truth for all permits, SCV Water has:

• Eliminated the risk of having a specific employee handle all permitting information. Now, permit management will remain consistent when people retire or new people join the team.
• Automated all permit-related tasks with task scheduling and notifications sent to key employees.
• Prioritized workflows thanks to easy visibility into work on-hand, so that no deadlines are missed.

“It is a lot more than automation, it is a central database and I now know where to go to find the data I need," says Abercrombie.

How Klir can help

Klir is a single, unified operating system for water, pulling every aspect of wastewater management—including compliance, sampling and more—into an easy to use dashboard.Learn moreabout how Klir can cut down on administration and recordkeeping work, create new opportunities for collaboration, and provide a level of system-wide visibility unmatched by other water data management systems.

“The team here in Las Vegas Valley Water District is so cooperative, and they are incredibly open to what we are trying to do with them”, explains Cillian O’Neill, Customer Success Manager at Klir. Klir COO Elaine Kelly and Cillian arrived a few weeks ago in Sin City to kick off the assessment phase of a pilot project aimed at centralizing the management of all Southern Nevada Water Authority’s environmental permits into one single system.

“SNWA manages hundreds of permits, covering a range of activities — from new construction to daily operations and environmental management”, said SNWA Deputy General Manager of Engineering and Operations Dave Johnson. “This is a tedious, time-consuming process and we look forward to exploring how Klir’s technology platform can enhance management of our regulatory compliance activities through improved operational efficiency.”

Improving Turn-Around Times for Data Gathering

Klir’s technology helps water utilities make water safer by providing them with a more effective way to manage their regulatory compliance missions. A suite of cloud-based compliance software solutions, the Klir platform gathers, monitors and analyzes regulatory compliance data, all in one easy-to-use web-based application. “We are excited to welcome Klir in our technology portfolio as we implement its technology through a partnership with the Southern Nevada Water Authority,” said WaterStart Executive Director Nate Allen. “Klir’s data management, analysis and sharing platform will help support better decision-making for water utilities, allowing utilities like SNWA to more efficiently manage environmental information from a single source to support critical environmental management processes while improving turn-around times for data gathering.”

Klir Platform Roll-out

The Klir platform is customizable and will be reflective of SNWA’s processes. The system will reduce the time that SNWA staff spends managing regulatory requirements. Over the course of six months, the Klir team will be working with a cross-departmental team to assess existing platforms and needs, customize a platform that will inform those needs, and implementing the platform for three months. “The Klir Team is excited to deploy its innovative regulatory management platform for SNWA”, said Klir CEO David Lynch. “As one of the leading global clusters for water innovation, WaterStart and SNWA are giving a fantastic vote of confidence in the power our platform can deliver on. We are looking forward to starting work with the team here in Las Vegas and help them transform regulatory obligations into advantages”.

About WaterStart

WaterStart is a cluster of global leaders in the implementation of water innovation. Based on the Las Vegas campus of the Desert Research Institute, WaterStart leverages the strategic resources and expertise of its network to evaluate and demonstrate the performance of water innovation. As a channel for innovation, WaterStart accelerates the rate of adoption of new solutions to real challenges facing water management agencies and large consumers.

For more information, visit www.waterstart.com.

Do you want to improve Environmental Permits Management in your organization? Talk to us and request demo: our team of experts can help you understand what success could look like for YOUR organization while improving your information management need.

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.

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

I am, at my very core, a centrist. No matter what subject, taking an extreme position at one end or an other rarely works. I like to describe this fondly as living in a world of grey, however bleak it might sound to an outside reader.

I apply this ethos to almost every aspect of my life (much to my families dismay). So it is no surprise that I applied this lens when noticing the ever growing number of predictions of how the US water market will consolidate and privatize. I think this is an over simplistic view of the market and even bordering on dangerous.

Many proponents of consolidation and privatization cite the baseline qualitative improvements on water quality when water schemes are taken out of public hands. There is no debating the facts on this and Britain is a good example of how this plays out over an extended period. But this approach is not without its challenges. Fines are being levied at an unprecedented level and there are a litany of accusations regarding shareholder dividend preference over consumer health. I think it is useful to ask, why does privatization work?

I like to think of best in class water management a bit like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. At the very foundation, you need the infrastructure delivering water services to be fit for purpose. Privatization enables relatively quick access to capital and competitive rates which is hard to argue against. Next is labour expertise. High quality engineers and scientists are accessible to the consolidated entity that would ordinarily not be the case. The next layer is professionalism. Studies repeatedly show that privatization empirically increases the level of professionalization in a water utility. This is measured against compliance, efficiency, economics and risk. The piece de resistance of best in class water management is holistic community engagement.

What is most interesting to note is the holy grail of community management is extremely hard for private entities to achieve as the objectives of a private utility and the community are in too stark a contrast.

Which leads me back to my love of the grey zone. How can we get the best of both worlds in all of the above. The jury is still out on infrastructure. The question of approaches like federal or state rotating schemes, Public Private partnerships (PPP), Design/Build/Operate (DBO) etc. are too complex to delve into here. However the middle two tiers can be solved with software. The issue is absolutely not that the staff are unqualified or not adequately motivated but more that given the nature of the community system, simply put, the users don’t have the volume of experience that a big utility would have. Software like CRP solves this as the collective experience of the sector is continually refined in a single platform to give insight where issues occur that have never occurred before. Technology is becoming cheaper, both software and hardware so things that were ordinarily unavailable to community systems are now cost effective. It also addresses the area of professionalization as the best in class processes and tools are being used by the smallest to the largest utilities, again driven primarily by the lowering cost and accessibility to a wider market.

I believe the only way to effective community involvement in water is engagement with a community driven organization. The objectives and mission of the utility must be deeply rooted in the community if they are to be trusted by stakeholders in the watershed that are typically at odds.

It is for this reason, I come down in the grey area when the debate of privatization comes up. I don’t think exclusively one option or the other works. However, I do believe the best in class systems will be those that are community managed with deep ties to, and reliance on, aspects of privatization such as PPP & DBO. It feels terribly like a politicians answer but the major difference is I actually came down on a side!

Today we’re excited to make our biggest product announcement to date! 

Klir Comply is a new integrated platform that builds upon what is already the most comprehensive software for water quality and compliance management on the market today.

This product release boldly moves the needle forward on compliance digitization for water utilities.

Meet Klir Comply

Today we’re launching Klir Comply, the foundation of our product, and the base framework we’ll be using to support water and wastewater utilities in their journey towards resilience and sustainability moving forward.

Its key purpose is to give you clear and accurate information on your compliance status and answer that simple but potentially costly question: 

“Is my water safe and compliant?”

From compliance to water quality and asset management data, it fills an industry gap and solves the growing problem of data quality and integrity, making it easier than ever before for water professionals to access impactful performance insights and make water better.

1. Supercharged Compliance Monitoring and Reporting

Klir Comply’s Drinking Water, Wastewater and Environmental tools make it easier than ever to develop, manage and track large and complex monitoring programs.

Built-in features like Safe Drinking Water Act limits and rules eliminate the need to calculate and monitor a wide range of parameters, regulatory requirements, limit sets, infrastructures, locations, and more, saving users hours every week in administrative busywork.

Klir Comply’s powerful new DMR tools in particular greatly simplify the wastewater compliance process, saving users hours of work every month while:

✅ Ensuring perfect alignment with NPDES and NetDMR requirements

✅ Minimizing common errors, duplications and discrepancies

✅ Reducing the risk of non-compliance and penalties

With Klir Comply, you have a new level of confidence in the accuracy and timeliness of your compliance reports, saving you resources, time and stress.

2. A New and Improved Mobile App for Sampling

Data entry in the field can be a slow, tricky and potentially error-prone process. But not with our new mobile app.

With Klir’s mobile features, recording data in the field is simple and secure. Its fieldwork-optimized interface runs smoothly on mobile devices, and Klir’s offline synching functionality makes field sampling possible even in remote areas with no internet connection.

3. Analytics and PowerBI Integration

As the operating system for water, Klir Comply provides a set of comprehensive and intelligible dashboards that give employees the information they need for their own specific needs—from the CEO to the treatment plant operator.

We’re happy to announce today that Klir Comply will seamlessly integrate with Power BI, unlocking the power of your wastewater data with powerful analytics. 

Real-time insights into plant operations and water quality trends made possible through this integration will help operators optimize plant performance while staying one step ahead of potential issues.

Insights Powered by ChatGPT

Today we’re also happy to announce that Klir will become the first water utility software to integrate with ChatGPT-4 through Microsoft Azure.

Combining the conversational benefits of ChatGPT with each utility’s water quality management and compliance data will greatly simplify tedious but critical tasks, all while ensuring internal data stays secure and private at all times.

“To be able to ask complex compliance water management questions and immediately receive accurate answers is seismic. We think it will help organizations around the world to slow the global water crisis,” said David Lynch, CEO of Klir.

Users will now be able to simply query “Boots,” Klir’s AI-powered assistant, in the form of a question, allowing them to:

• ‍Integrate administrative tasks with sampling results data
  “Boots, write a formal email response to my manager outlining results of Well 57 and let him know that my position on it is that we are compliant.”‍
• Easily generate quantitative insights into sampling results
  “Boots, what percentage of Lead results have been non-compliant so far this year?”‍
• ‍Perform predictive analysis of water quality
  “Boots, where are we likely to get limit exceedances in the next 90 days?”

The tool is now available in Beta to select Klir users. This feature is available on an ‘opt-in’ basis, so the utility’s software administrator can control whether it gets used.

That means, when using Klir’s ChatGPT integration, you can trust that your data is secure, all while working with a partner dedicated to refining and improving the delivery of AI-powered insights in the water sector.

Now Available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace

We’re also excited to announce that starting today, Klir is partnering with Microsoft and making its software available for purchase and download through the Azure app store.

This new partnership promises to supercharge and bring a new level of functionality to Klir, making it easier than ever before to bring all of your work under one umbrella.

🔒 With Azure Marketplace, your IT department can have Klir up and running within your ecosystem in a matter of days with the confidence that your data is secure and protected by some of the world’s most thorough cybersecurity protocols.

💸 You can also reduce IT costs by eliminating multiple legacy point solutions, getting more out of your Microsoft investment, and even reducing time spent on support tickets.

🧭 The days of having incoherent data dotted around your organization are coming to an end. Building on tools like GPT, Azure, Power BI and Sharepoint, in the near future you’ll see Klir even further integrated into the Microsoft stack, from Teams, to Powerpoint, Outlook and Word, to name just a few.

Welcome to the Future of Water

We’re so excited to get these tools into the hands of our users and to see how utilities will use Klir Comply to streamline and improve their work.

We’re confident that this new suite of features presents one of the most exciting advancements in water utility software to date, and we can’t wait to see how experts working on the front lines of our industry will use them to make water better.

Backflow can bring contaminants in homes and businesses back into the main drinking water line, threatening public safety, undermining trust in the water supply, and creating legal and financial headaches for water suppliers.

We all have a role to play in preventing backflow, but in most cases responsibility ultimately falls with local water providers and inspectors. The problem is that many backflow prevention programs are under-resourced and compete with other priorities like distribution, water quality and even FOG, overburdening operators and forcing them to juggle many hats.

The tools utilities use to manage their cross-connection control records don’t help either.

Outdated software, spreadsheets and even paper forms and files create headaches for workers in the field, while administrators at the utility spend hours hunting down test reports, correspondence with customers, and important information about backflow devices.

All of that extra recordkeeping and data entry work is adding up, preventing operators from focusing on tasks that actually add value like inspections, surveys and infrastructure management.

Here are three ways to cut down on the amount of time operators spend administering backflow prevention and more time on actually preventing it.

1. Streamline Reporting and Data Entry

Cross-connection control generates a lot of data, and making sure that data is captured and organized the right way can be a challenge.

Take something as basic as the forms inspectors fill out when they carry out routine backflow assembly tests. Properly filling one out can take a significant amount of time because:

• Test forms can vary by jurisdiction
• Different submission requirements might require paper mail, fax or email submittal
• Forms will often try to fit many different test types–RPZ, DC, DCDA, RPDA, and PVB—onto a single page

Doing everything you can to minimize data entry time and remove as many sources of friction from this process as possible keeps inspectors happy and productive while cutting down on delays and unnecessary work.

One essential piece in your toolkit: a web-based, configurable reporting tool like Klir that simplifies inspection management and provides a user-friendly interface for risk assessment, survey, test and incident report data entry.

Replacing a spreadsheet or paper-based process with a web-based one can save inspectors hours of data entry time per week and free them up for more important tasks.

2. Increase Data Accessibility

Getting data into your system is important. But getting that data back out and into the hands of the people who need it most is crucial, especially if your water system experiences a backflow event.

In addition to potentially endangering public safety, causing denial of service to customers and loss of revenue for the utility, backflow incidents can put a huge administrative burden on water providers.

One study by the American Backflow Prevention Association (ABPA) found that operators spent an average of 494 hours investigating each backflow event, incurring an average personnel cost of $14,800 per incident. Another study from USC put that figure at $16,143 and found that one utility had spent more than $1.6 million responding to a single event.

Keeping risk assessment, survey report and inspection data in one easy to use system can make a world of difference during a backflow investigation, helping:

1. Cut down on time lost hunting down information
2. Improve response times and ultimately cut down on risks to public safety
3. Simplify backflow incident reporting

It bears remembering that most large water providers are legally obligated to keep these records. Not keeping them in a dedicated data management or recordkeeping system could create issues around liability and even result in fines, especially if a backflow incident ever occurs.

3. Bring Everything Together Into One Dashboard

We’ve talked about the personnel hours and costs involved in a backflow investigation. But what about the day-to-day work of scheduling inspection routes, corresponding with customers and reporting to regulators?

Those priorities can be difficult to stay on top of when you’re tied up with record keeping and paperwork. But they’re also precisely what we create more time for when we do a better job of managing backflow data.

Powerful dashboards like Klir can do exactly that, giving administrators easy access to their entire backflow prevention program at a glance and bringing it all together into one detailed report, making it easier to:

• Plan and manage inspections
• Track important program metrics like new installations and enforcement actions
• Stay on top of compliance, violations and correspondence with customers

Take Control of Your Cross-Connection Program With Klir

Klir’s backflow module helps utilities schedule, organize, and run effective cross-connection control programs. Most importantly, it gives organizations the means to keep comprehensive digital records on all their cross-connection activities. To learn more, book a demo today.

“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.

“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.”

Managing permits under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) is complex and high stakes for water utilities.

Ensuring NPDES compliance at your utility is not just important—it’s critical. While some discharges are routine and controlled, others are unplanned and can come up suddenly, such as combined sewer overflows, pipe breaks, and water main leaks. Either way, under NPDES they must be properly documented and reported. Failing to meet these requirements can result in hefty regulatory fines. In some situations, mismanaging NPDES compliance could even lead to a jail sentence.

What is NPDES?

The Clean Water Act prohibits anybody from discharging pollutants through a point source (such as a water or wastewater utility), into a “water of the United States” unless they have an NPDES permit. The permit includes limits on what you can discharge, stipulates monitoring and reporting requirements, and outlines other provisions to protect water quality and human health.

Achieving NPDES Coverage in California

Managing water pollutants is a huge concern for water and wastewater utilities. In California, it's a particularly big issue.

“Unlike some other states, we don’t have a lot of water. When utilities discharge into limited receiving waters, any pollutants are more likely to have an environmental impact,” says Francois Rodigari, Director of Corporate Sustainability & Innovation for San Jose Water.

Despite this, for years drinking water utilities did not qualify for existing discharge permits—even for routine reasons.

“In some cases, the regional water quality control board fined utilities for discharge incidents, even though there was no NPDES permit available to them,” he adds. “While most drinking water utilities followed the general NPDES requirements, we didn’t have permit coverage and consequently we weren’t doing any reporting. Our utilities were at risk.”

Rodigari was Director of Water Quality and Environmental Services when San Jose Water decided it would seek out better ways to manage NPDES. His team was instrumental in developing the Statewide General NPDES Permit for Drinking Water System Discharges to Waters of the United States, which the California State Water Board adopted in November 2014. Today, all utilities in the state with 1,000 connections or more are required to apply for an NPDES permit (unless they qualify under another permit). 

Ensuring NPDES Compliance Through Best Management Practices

With a state-wide solution, it’s now easier for utilities to make NPDES permit applications. For some utilities, NPDES has also underscored the importance of building and maintaining an accessible database.

“For NPDES compliance, we have to track and report our discharges when they’re over a certain volume,” says Rodigari. “There are annual reporting requirements, too. It’s a lot of information to manage.”

To support the state’s water utilities as they navigate NPDES, the San Jose Water Environmental Compliance group also led an effort to update the Best Management Practices Manual (BMP) for Drinking Water System Releases for the California-Nevada Section of the American Water Works Association. The manual provides directions on how to minimize and handle the number of planned and unplanned discharges.

How to Handle Common NPDES Challenges:

For many utilities, moving toward NPDES compliance is part of an ongoing commitment to implementing best management practices. For others, it means taking a brand new approach to managing data and meeting reporting requirements. 

Wherever you are in the process, achieving NPDES compliance probably means your utility will be going through some changes. 

With this in mind, we asked Rodigari to share some of his team’s best practices for improving utility performance and making NPDES reporting easier.

1. An effective data management system is key to achieving ISO 14001 standards

Achieving compliance in line with ISO 14001 standards means setting up an effective environmental management system. The requirements are extensive, Rodigari says. “Most utilities are actively working toward meeting the management framework, but it remains a complex process.”

Rodigari says choosing a secure, robust compliance system to manage your utility’s data is a critical part of the ISO 14001 journey.

“As an industry, we can no longer depend on spreadsheets,” he says. “The environmental and economic risks are too great.”

NPDES reporting requires utilities to track permit obligations, discharges, reporting, and fines. With the right platform in place, you can achieve compliance, but your utility can also raise its game. “When you can visualize your data and reports, it’s easier to see the ways you can improve your utility’s performance,” he says.

2. Track Hazardous Waste Sites Assessment Data for Reporting—and Future Projects

As a 150-year-old utility, San Jose Water often learns about legacy sites through site assessments for construction, renovation, or facility retirement. 

“When we complete an assessment, we generate a lot of data about the soil and hazmat that we might not have already known existed on the site,” Rodigari says. 

San Jose Water uses this information to prepare bidding documents. “Contractors need to know about any precautions they need to take during demolition and disposal,” he says. 

If the findings require action, the utility might map the site and construct barriers to ensure runoff doesn’t migrate to another property. In other cases, the utility works with Santa Clara County and the Department of Environmental Health to propose a cleanup and remediation plan. 

Furthermore, the utility maps the sites to protect workers. “If future work will disturb the soil, workers need to know,” Rodigari says.

With more than 100 properties, San Jose Water can’t manage everything with individual engineering reports, Rodigari adds. “We need our data to be readily available and easy to retrieve. It’s critical for managers to have that information.”

3. Keep a Central Record of Hazmat Manifests

A utility is required—and has an obligation—to manage hazardous materials manifests in order to minimize liability from cradle to grave, Rodigari says. “When you have multiple entities generating and disposing of waste on your utility’s behalf, you need a system that allows everyone to report uniformly.” 

In California there are tax requirements associated with generating hazmat and solid waste. Manifests play a key role in the ability to draw an inventory and understand its fate, he adds, so it’s important to store them in a platform that is easy to query.

4.  Remove the Burden of Gathering Environmental and Compliance Data with Automated Reports and Alerts

Automating NPDES reports can lift a huge administrative burden for a utility. The first challenge, however, is making sure you have all of the relevant data in the right place.

Rodigari says it can take time to harmonize NPDES data sources, but it should be an important priority. “Across our utility, several teams generate discharges, from operations to contractors to field service. Ensuring all reports are properly filed in one platform and easy to retrieve is a best practice that can protect your utility from liability.”

For San Jose Water, fully automating all NPDES reporting is a goal for the longer term. In the meantime, the utility is aiming to collect all data in one platform, Rodigari says. And, to ensure compliance, the utility’s platform is programmed to send reminders to parties responsible for collecting data that the NPDES permit requires. “If there’s a failure to document, the platform issues an escalation. This helps managers track and follow up on missed deadlines.”

Improving Performance and Environmental Impact with NPDES Best Practices

Rodigari says he's confident that the state-wide NPDES permit has improved best management practices in California’s water utilities. For San Jose Water, that’s meant a major shift in the way the utility manages discharges.

“We’re doing a better job of ensuring water quality, including reducing turbidity, and removing chlorine prior to discharge,” Rodigari says. “We’re also minimizing water loss during discharges, and we’ve set some ambitious goals in terms of non-revenue water.”

Rodigari credits the utility’s hard work, as well as the way the industry is starting to think about data and reporting. “Making sense of our data is an important step in the path to improving our environmental impact and organizational performance,” he says. “That’s the point of NPDES.”

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.

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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.

If you follow the technology industry today, you’ve almost certainly heard about how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming everything from hardware and engineering, to data science and analytics, to everyday tools like search engines and apps.

The water industry has been no exception. Water utilities already use machine learning and other similarly sophisticated data analysis technologies to help with pipe maintenance and leak detection, LSL replacement, contaminant identification and more.

But the latest wave of AI innovation, particularly large language model tools like ChatGPT, promise to bring the fruits of AI out of the laboratory and machine shop into the rest of the utility to help tackle some of the biggest management challenges of the 21st century. 

Here we’ll take a look at how water utility managers and administrators could very quickly start using tools like Klir’s ChatGPT integration to streamline and save time on management-related tasks like permitting and compliance, project management, emergency response, planning and more. 

In particular, we’ll look at how these tools could be leveraged to remove a lot of the friction surrounding water quality program management, a process that involves gathering and ingesting large amounts of data: an ideal candidate for automation and AI.

The ChatGPT-Driven AI ‘Renaissance’

If you’ve ever performed a Google search or asked Spotify for a music recommendation, you’ve already used algorithms or machine learning, the building blocks of AI, to help you get what you need.  

Large language models like ChatGPT, however, are a recent breakthrough that could make those tools easier for non-technology specialists to use and apply to their work. 

Unlike nascent AI systems that relied on specific programmed rules, large language models like ChatGPT learn from patterns in data, enabling them to provide more nuanced and contextually relevant information.

ChatGPT, in particular, is designed to generate human-like text responses and engage in interactive conversations, making it an ideal tool for managers, administrators and other workers at the utility with non-technical backgrounds who need quick and accurate answers to management-related queries.

“It finds the most relevant pieces of information, even if it’s millions of documents or data points, and presents the top ranked results to the language model, [which] lets you have detailed, informed interactions with your data,” Microsoft’s head of Azure Cognitive Search Pablo Castro explained during a recent presentation on ChatGPT applications.

Secured with enterprise-grade security in Microsoft Azure, Klir’s own Chat GPT integration gives users the ability to query millions of data points within the utility’s private internal data, all while respecting the information protection controls put in place.

“Because the knowledge lives outside of the ChatGPT model, you’re in control of it, and it’s not used to train the model,” says Castro. “And equally important from an enterprise perspective: any chat session state lives entirely within your application. Whether you keep it or not, and where, is fully up to you.”

How AI Can Help Tackle the Problem of 21st-Century Water Management

The management of water resources in the 21st century presents a dizzying number of challenges, with factors like increasing demand, ageing infrastructure, climate change, and stricter regulations all placing additional pressure on our water systems.

AI can play a crucial role in addressing each of these challenges by automating away some of the most arduous administrative tasks that managers must deal with on a day-to-day basis. Some key areas where AI can make a significant impact include:

Project Management

Whether it’s implementing infrastructure projects like pipeline replacements or capital upgrades, navigating amalgamation and other governance changes, or simply navigating the endless to-do list involved in running a large urban utility, most of the tasks involved in 21st century water utility management requires careful planning and coordination. 

A quick, intuitive-to-use AI assistant can help with almost every aspect of project management, whether it be by analyzing historical data, predicting potential bottlenecks, optimizing resource allocation, or providing real-time monitoring and reporting. 

A recent study from MIT confirmed that ChatGPT can raise an organization’s average productivity, team morale and collaboration while increasing “job satisfaction and self-efficacy.”

As workers become more comfortable with AI tools, their ability to help streamline projects and deliver them more efficiently will only increase. 

Emergency Response and Planning

When natural disasters or water contamination incidents occur, quick and informed decision-making is crucial. AI-powered tools can process real-time data from sensor networks, work order management software, and even social media to provide early warnings, assess risks, and support decision-making during emergency situations. 

One large utility in the UK already uses AI tools to process data from over 7,000 pressure and flow sensors every 15 minutes, enabling operators to reliably detect pipe bursts and leaks within minutes of them occurring. 

With intuitive tools like ChatGPT, those insights could be made available to water professionals at the utility, enhancing situational awareness and helping utilities to respond effectively to minimize the impact on water supplies and public health.

Permitting and Compliance

Water utility managers are often burdened with complex regulatory requirements and lengthy permitting processes involving countless pages of forms, applications, regulations and reporting deadlines. It isn’t unusual for large urban utilities to manage thousands of individual regulation schedules and permits at a single time, and all too often the burden of managing all of that paperwork can end up falling on the shoulders of a single employee.

With Klir’s ChatGPT integration, a utility worker can alleviate some of that burden by asking the platform to retrieve important data, summarize important deadlines, or even draft an email to a superior explaining why they’re confident they’re in compliance.

The sheer volume of data and paperwork involved in compliance makes it a perfect candidate for automation with AI, which can streamline these tasks by automating document review, analyzing compliance data, and identifying potential issues or discrepancies, saving time, reducing human error, and ensuring adherence to regulatory standards.

Why AI Tools Are a Particularly Good Fit for Water Quality Programs

Monitoring and maintaining water quality involves numerous complex data-intensive processes, requiring continuous monitoring of various parameters such as pH, turbidity, metals, bacteria and more.

Traditionally these monitoring processes involve manual sampling, laboratory testing, and data analysis, all of which are time-consuming and resource-intensive. Moreover, the vast amount of data generated from monitoring activities makes it challenging to extract actionable insights in a timely manner.

Tools like Klir’s ChatGPT integration can help water quality professionals get to the data they need more quickly, generate quantitative insights into sampling results, identify areas of non-compliance, and save time by simplifying or completely automating away administrative tasks.

Predictive Analysis of Water Quality

AI-powered sensors and IoT (Internet of Things) devices can collect real-time data on water quality parameters, providing a continuous stream of information. This data can be analyzed by AI algorithms to identify trends, predict changes, and detect potential contaminants or hazards. This proactive approach allows utilities to take preventive measures before water quality problems escalate, thus safeguarding public health.

With conversational AI tools, querying that information becomes easier than ever before. Instead of sifting through numerous dashboards, getting the information you need can be as simple as asking ChatGPT for it in the form of a question, e.g.: “hey Klir, where are we likely to get limit exceedances in the next 90 days?” 

Integrating Administrative Tasks with Sampling Results Data

When it comes time to act on important data, AI assistants can help automate the administrative side of water quality management as well. 

Instead of sifting through numerous spreadsheets or charts, you might simply ask your AI assistant to “write a formal email response to my manager outlining results of Well 57.” 

You might also ask the assistant to let your manager know that your position on those results is that the utility is compliant, or that the results indicate the need to take action. With tools like ChatGPT, you can spend less time digging for data and drafting emails, and more time looking ahead and making sure your department is ready to take on future challenges proactively.

Fast Quantitative Insights and Reporting of Non-Compliance

Quick: what percentage of lead tests at site #42 have been non-compliant so far this year? With an AI assistant, generating quantitative insights from sampling data and flagging potential non-compliance transforms from a time-consuming, potentially error-prone process into a quick and painless case of asking the system a question.

Respecting Internal Information Controls

When ChatGPT is deployed on an organization’s internal servers, the AI model can learn from your data without the need to ever share it externally, making it easy to respect the utility’s information protection controls and keeping sensitive customer data, infrastructure details, and compliance records safe.

Why AI Could Represent the Next Big Leap Forward in 21st Century Water Utility Management 

Recent advances in AI technology like ChatGPT holds immense potential for transforming water utility management. By leveraging AI tools, utility managers and administrators can streamline and save time on management-related tasks such as permitting and compliance, project management, emergency response and planning, and specifically supporting water quality programs. 

"Our dream is that Klir becomes a member of your team,” says Klir CEO David Lynch. “With help from Klir’s ChatGPT integration, workers at every level of the utility will be able to spend less time dealing with repetitive tasks and more time learning from their peers and tackling the monumental challenges of 21st century water management.”

With the ability to process and analyze vast amounts of data, AI will empower utilities to make more informed decisions, improve operational efficiency, and ultimately ensure the provision of high-quality water services to communities. And as AI continues to advance, the future of water management looks promising, with increased sustainability, resilience, and responsiveness to the challenges of the 21st century.

Municipalities and utilities have turned to electronic reporting tools (ERTs) to streamline, consolidate and automate their water and wastewater data processes for decades.

These tools cut down on lost or duplicate data, provide users with automated alerts, and generally make sampling a much less painful and time-consuming process.

At the same time, water managers know that sampling is just one part of the equation.

No part of a successful water management operation can function in isolation from another—but that’s also precisely what happens when utilities need a different application to manage each aspect of the water process, whether it be water quality or effluent monitoring, permitting, or inspections.

Adopting a truly unified approach to water management might be the only way that municipalities and utilities can protect themselves from another problem: too many tools.

To illustrate how, we’re going to compare two different water sampling solutions today:

Klir

An all-in-one cloud-based water management platform—and more specifically Klir’s sampling capabilities, which delivering fast and up to date sampling and water quality results to decision makers at water and wastewater utilities.

WaterTrax

An electronic reporting tool provided by Aquatic Informatics.

Klir Water Management Software: A Quick Intro

Until recently, the information that operators and managers at water utilities needed to do their jobs was fragmented, dispersed across numerous systems, incomplete, or otherwise difficult to access.

Launched in 2018, Klir is the first system to bring these disparate functions together into one complete SaaS based software suite.

Klir's Drinking Water Management platform allows water quality teams to manage monitoring plans and sampling outcomes against relevant legislation and regulations such as the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). Meanwhile, Klir's Wastewater Management Platform allows treatment plant operators to manage effluent reporting and DMR reports, so they can stay compliant with key regulation such as NPDES (National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System).

Instead of relying on a mishmash of different systems and software, Klir brings the entire team onto one platform and pulls in data from lab reports, LIMS, SCADA & GIS to create a single source of truth for sampling activities utility-wide.

This allows operators to

• See trends across the entire water system—from sampling, to permitting, inspections & more—and make decisions with clarity and confidence.
• Automate manual tasks and data analysis that were once tracked in Excel or Outlook, from scheduling sampling runs, to interpreting sampling results, to generating regulatory reports, eliminating 1+ days of admin work each week.
• Have peace of mind knowing that Klir’s automatic alerts for MCLs, operational limits, and numerous other types of limits will trigger in case anything ever goes wrong, and feel confident that every sample has been completed on time.

WaterTrax: A Brief Overview

WaterTrax was first launched in 2002 with the goal of helping utilities and municipalities detect adverse water quality events earlier and faster, offering quick access to current and historical data, automatic alerts, and a consolidated repository for lab data, all in a web-based system that didn’t require and special hardware or software to run.

Today WaterTrax’s focus is water and wastewater management, and the typical user will use the tool to do three things: set up a sampling schedule, set up their water infrastructure, and begin consuming data from labs and field samples.

In 2017, WaterTrax was acquired by Vancouver’s Aquatic Informatics company, where it exists alongside a family of applications purpose-built for different aspects of the water management process, including:

1. Aquarius Samples, an environmental lab and field sample data production tool.
2. Linko, an Industrial Pretreatment and FOG solution.
3. Tokay, a backflow prevention and cross-connection control tool.

One Platform vs. a Family of Separate Apps

While WaterTrax and the Klir sampling module might have a lot of overlap, the biggest difference between the two is Klir’s unified platform approach to water, as opposed to Aquatic Informatics’ à la carte approach.

While Klir users can move seamlessly from managing water and wastewater processes to other key processes such as permitting, inspections, asset management, and backflow or cross-connections, WaterTrax users are forced to switch to a different Aquatic Informatics application every time.

The Klir system unifies sampling and water monitoring alongside permitting, inspections, asset management, and backflow or cross-connections. This allows utilities to:

Break Down Silos

Reducing contradictory data, enabling constant information sharing across departments and teams, and reducing knowledge-loss during employee retirements or absences.

Spend Less time on Implementation

Klir allows utilities to train multiple teams on a single system and manage multiple process in one central software system.

Work With a Single Source of Truth

As your organization grows and its data needs increase, your ability to create and work from a single point of truth will become increasingly important.

The Klir Water Management Platform in Action

In addition to the benefits of Klir’s platform approach, there are also specific areas where Klir allows utilities to manage sampling and water quality outcomes with ease:

1. Powerful Monitoring Plans and Sample Scheduling

Klir unifies monitoring plans and sample scheduling across the utility, and making those functions available across working groups (whether it be compliance, water quality, operations, or treatment facilities).

Klir is a SaaS-based program that can be securely accessed on any device, anywhere, and is designed with an intuitive user interface so that any delegated user in your organization can set up their monitoring plan, select what they want to monitor against, track sampling outcomes against relevant parameters, and provision their plan with a set of recurring tasks.

2. Better Lab Data Processing

Klir currently provides users with numerous ways of entering data into the system, including:

• Manual frontend data entry
• Frontend data import through the import tool
• SCADA import
• SFTP file transfers
• Sample results APIs (future)

Klir is also developing a sampling API that will expand even further on users’ ability to get data into the Klir system easily.

3. Powerful Customization and Automation Functions

With automatic alerts and notifications triggered by sampling processes, Klir allows operators to create custom rules for almost any process or parameter in their water data management system, making it a powerful automation tool.

Klir vs. WaterTrax: Feature-by-Feature

4. It’s Built for Maximum Accessibility

Unlike most legacy water systems, Klir focuses on providing a user-friendly, intuitive and accessible experience that is designed to be used by anyone within the utility, regardless of experience. Klir makes your systems more transparent, not less, making it the clear choice for readability and ease of use out of the box.

5. One Product, One Vision

Klir is unique among competing water management platforms which because it was built as a unified water management solution from the ground up.

This means Klir allows users to avoid the pitfalls commonly associated with legacy software suites—including duplicate data, overlapping processes, multiple licenses, uneven product development, and lack of cross-app integration—while ensuring that your team can be trained and brought onto a single, unified system.

6. Collaboration and Task Management Tools

Klir allows teams to manage all of their tasks in-app, offering an internal chat and reply functionality, user tagging, and commenting, turning the platform into a single channel for collaboration and project management across the organization.

Meanwhile, legacy water management systems often don’t include internal collaboration or communications tools, forcing teams to come up with their own off-platform solutions (usually email).

Whether it’s cross connection control, industrial pretreatment, or sampling, tracking regulatory compliance across the different programs and departments at a water and wastewater utility can be a massive undertaking.

Operators need access to a variety of data points to budget, plan for, and manage these challenges effectively, and many have turned to dedicated compliance tracking software to fill the gap.

While these tools are a step up from spreadsheets and post-it notes of the past, they aren’t perfect. Operators looking for a single tool to manage all aspects of compliance might find some of them outdated or limited in functionality.

Today we’re going to explore these tradeoffs by comparing two separate compliance tracking solutions:

Klir

An all-in-one cloud-based operating system for drinking water & wastewater utilities—and more. Klir’s inspection tools help utilities run more effective backflow, FOG and industrial pretreatment programs while cutting down on administration and record-keeping work.

SwiftComply

A compliance management tool offering backflow prevention, FOG management, and industrial pretreatment solutions.

Klir: A Quick Intro

Launched in 2018, Klir is an all-in-one operating system for drinking water & wastewater that brings your entire team onto one platform, pulling in data from lab reports, LIMS, SCADA & GIS to create a single source of truth for compliance utility-wide. This allows operators to:

Work With Trends

See trends across the entire water system—from sampling, to permitting, inspections & more—and make decisions with clarity and confidence.

Use Automation

Automate manual tasks and data analysis that were once tracked in Excel or Outlook, from scheduling sampling runs, to interpreting sampling results, and generating regulatory reports, eliminating 1+ days of admin work each week.

Receive Alerts

Have peace of mind knowing that Klir’s automatic alerts for MCLs and non-compliance will trigger in case anything ever goes wrong, and feel confident that every sample has been completed on time.

SwiftComply: A Quick Intro

Launched in 2016, SwiftComply began as a tool to help utilities manage FOG programs. In 2019, the company acquired XC2, a specialized backflow program management software vendor, which it began to replace with a newer updated tool called SwiftComply Backflow.

Today SwiftComply offers modules for FOG, backflow, and industrial pretreatment, stormwater, and customer management, building on its strengths in FOG and pretreatment and offering users powerful features like real-time compliance data monitoring.

Klir vs. SwiftComply: Which One Is Right for You?

SwiftComply and Klir have a lot of overlap, but there are four big differences between them that are worth keeping in mind when considering whether they’re the right fit for your operation: scope, collaboration, pricing, and data ownership.

1. One Tool For Everything

SwiftComply might work well if you already use it to manage your cross connection control data, and it might also work if you’re a solo operator looking for a tool dedicated to managing your backflow program alone.

But if you’re looking for a truly all-encompassing tool that plugs into the rest of your operation—including sampling, customer management, resource recovery and more—you might consider using a tool like Klir instead.

Klir’s commitment to building one unified platform for water utility management means it avoids the pitfalls commonly associated with legacy software suites—including duplicate data, overlapping processes, multiple licenses, uneven product development, and lack of cross-app integration—while ensuring that your team can be trained and brought onto a single, unified system.

2. Pricing Tailored For Growth

Another major difference between SwiftComply and Klir is pricing: the former follows a usage-based pricing model, whereas Klir offers personalized pricing based on a utility’s needs.

To most operators new to water data management software, a tool like SwiftComply can seem as good as “free.” There are no flat licensing costs, and if a utility does not upload any data to Swiftcomply, they don’t pay anything.

But while the financial barrier to entry might be low, usage based pricing can also work against you, discouraging use of the tool in general.

Going with a predictable, tailored fee like Klir’s means that you can keep a rapidly growing population’s drinking water safe without the surprise of a massive bill.

Klir focuses on enabling the utility to grow with its city, rather than penalizing it. If you’re keen on software that is as easy to use as it is to budget for, consider Klir.

3. Collaboration

SwiftComply provides users real-time data to monitor compliance. But like other legacy systems, it doesn’t include internal collaboration or communications tools, forcing teams to come up with their own off-platform solutions (usually email).

If you’re looking for a tool that does more than just monitoring, especially project management and other automation-enabled collaboration tasks, you should consider Klir instead.

Klir merges multiple data sources and processes into a single collaborative platform and paves the way for a more proactive, collaborative, and resilient water management program. Directors can independently access every aspect of the water management data—including compliance and sampling–with an easy-to-use executive dash dashboard, freeing-up the time of their subordinates and empowering them to get the data they need in an instant.

Klir allows teams to manage all of their tasks within the app, offering an internal chat and reply functionality, user tagging, and commenting, turning the platform into a single channel for collaboration and project management across the organization.

4. Privacy and Data Ownership

As utilities move more of their data from physical logbooks, spreadsheets and calendars into the digital sphere, who exactly has access to—or even outright owns—that data can become murkier.

One big concern for utilities who work with private inspectors and contractors on functions like  backflow is ownership over inspection data. With SwiftComply, third-party inspectors own the data that they enter into the system. With Klir, the utility has full ownership of inspector data.

Conclusion

Despite SwiftComply’s strengths in cross connection and FOG program management, Klir’s all-encompassing, user-friendly approach to data management makes it the clear winner for utilities looking to manage all of their programs out of one system.

1. Klir’s focus on creating a single source of truth for all of your utility’s programs—from sampling and compliance to industrial pretreatment—provides program managers with the data and confidence they need to make important operational decisions.
2. Klir’s straightforward pricing structure makes it easier to budget and doesn’t penalize users for increased usage.
3. Klir’s focus on project management and in-app communication also makes it the clear choice for utilities and programs looking for a single tool to encompass all aspects of program management.

Operations And Compliance Management For Everyone

Looking for a simple, straightforward compliance tracking tool that you can use straight out of the box? Learn more about how Klir can cut down on administration and recordkeeping work, create new opportunities for collaboration, and provide a level of system-wide visibility unmatched by other water data management systems.

For utilities managing multiple programs like drinking and wastewater, cross connection control, and industrial pretreatment, bringing operational and compliance data from across the organization into one environment can be a big undertaking.

Over the years, numerous engineering, IT consulting, and software companies have developed tools to help utilities manage this process. But while they might be a step up from paper and spreadsheet-based data management, not all operational and compliance management software is created equal.

Today we’re going to explore some of these differences by comparing two platforms:

Klir

An all-in-one cloud-based operating system for water & wastewater utilities. Klir pulls compliance, sampling, reporting and more into an easy to use dashboard, cutting down on administration and record-keeping work while providing a level of organization-wide visibility unmatched by other systems.

SAMS

An operations and compliance management suite from NJBSoft built for managing water, wastewater, industrial pretreatment, backflow, stormwater, air quality and asset management programs.

Klir: A Quick Intro

Until recently, the information that operators and managers at water utilities needed to do their jobs was fragmented, dispersed across numerous systems, incomplete, or otherwise difficult to access.

Launched in 2018, Klir is the first system to bring these disparate functions together into one complete, all-in-one operating system (OS) for water & wastewater utilities.

Instead of relying on a mishmash of different systems and software, Klir brings the entire team onto one platform and pulls in data from lab reports, LIMS, SCADA & GIS to create a single source of truth for sampling activities utility-wide.

This allows operators to:

Work With Trends

See trends across the entire water system—from sampling, to permitting, inspections & more—and make decisions with clarity and confidence.

Use Automation

Automate manual tasks and data analysis that were once tracked in Excel or Outlook, from scheduling sampling runs, to interpreting sampling results, and generating regulatory reports, eliminating 1+ days of admin work each week.

Receive Alerts

Have peace of mind knowing that Klir’s automatic alerts for MCLs and non-compliance will trigger in case anything ever goes wrong, and feel confident that every sample has been completed on time.

SAMS: A Quick Intro

Launched in 2009, NJBSoft’s Sampling and Monitoring System (SAMS) began as an integrated operations and compliance solution for the Civil, Environmental and Municipal Engineering sector.

Today, the company offers seven separate ‘SAMS’ covering different aspects of water utility data management, including:

• Compliance and permit management for drinking and wastewater utilities (SAMS Water and SAMS Wastewater)
• Suites for managing industrial pretreatment (SAMS IPP), cross connection control (SAMS Cross Connection) and stormwater (SAMS Stormwater) programs
• A tool for managing Clean Air Act and other air quality compliance (SAMS Air Quality)
• A new asset management module (SAMS Asset Management)

Klir vs. SAMS: Which One Is Right for You?

While SAMS and Klir might have a lot of overlap, there are three major differences that set the two platforms apart: degree of customizability vs. configurability, how each platform handles data visualization, and collaboration tools. Here’s what each of them means for your utility:

1. Customizability vs. Configurability

Generally speaking, users get the most out of NJBSoft’s SAMS by customizing and changing the tool to fit their specific situation.

Organizations that have substantial IT and computer engineering resources have the ability to make code-level changes to SAMS, which can result in a tool that is closely tailored to a specific utility or department’s data management needs and situation.

Klir’s “click not code” approach to configurability, on the other hand, means that any user can automate processes and manage tasks without the steep learning curve.

While customizable software might offer users a more tailored approach, it’s also more expensive, both from a financial and human resources perspective.

When budgets get tight, the last thing your department needs is to sink thousands of dollars into hiring engineers to customize software you’ve already paid for. Meanwhile, configurable software is cheaper to adapt to your specific needs, and cheaper to maintain.

2. Data Visualization

We can make a similar comparison between the two platforms when it comes to another important function: pulling and synthesizing large amounts of operational and compliance data into easy-to-understand dashboards and reports.

While both platforms offer data visualization, the SAMS platform requires complex, time-consuming queries to pull operational data into dashboards.

Klir’s single-click reporting and dashboard capabilities, on the other hand, are focused on saving time and being as user-friendly as possible. There’s no need for an experienced ‘power user’ to immediately start getting value out of Klir. Powerful out-of-the-box dashboards make data more digestible for everyone, whether you’re a seasoned Klir user or using the platform for the first time.

Pulling data into reports is a similarly painless process. With a single click, operators can generate compliance reports that are instantly ready for submission to state and local regulators.

Overall, Klir’s fully configurable platform offers a simple yet comprehensive solution for all users to set up their dashboards, notifications, and forms, making it easy to visualize important information such as inspection outcomes, compliance status, and sampling results at a glance.

3. Collaboration

SAMS internal collaboration and communications tools are limited, forcing teams to handle most project management work outside of the app. If you’re looking for a tool that prioritizes project management functionality and other automation-enabled collaboration tasks, you should consider Klir instead.

Klir provides a single collaborative platform that paves the way for more proactive, collaborative programs, offering an internal chat and reply functionality, user tagging, and commenting, turning the platform into a single channel for collaboration and project management across the organization.

Conclusion

While SAMS’ operations and compliance management tools might meet the needs of power users with substantial IT and engineering resources, Klir’s out-of-the-box, user-friendly approach makes it the clear favorite for the average program manager.

1. Klir’s focus on configurability cuts down on the substantial time and effort users must invest in customizable platforms like SAMS.
2. Klir’s intuitive, user-friendly interface and query-free dashboard interface makes it the more powerful tool out-of-the-box. Users with little to no experience using the platform can immediately start creating data visualizations and generating reports for regulators.
3. Klir’s focus on project management and in-app communication also makes it the clear choice for utilities and programs looking for a single tool to encompass all aspects of program management.
4. Klir is committed to providing your utility with continued personalized support throughout your entire journey, including a dedicated Klir Customer Success Manager and a comprehensive change management plan to make the transition as seamless as possible.

Operations And Compliance Management For Everyone

Interested in learning how to get configurable dashboards without a computer science degree? Learn more about how Klir can cut down on administration and recordkeeping work, create new opportunities for collaboration, and provide a level of system-wide visibility unmatched by other water data management systems.

Whether it’s pathogens, PFAS, flood, drought, or a host of other factors, successful water management comes with a gauntlet of complex and interlinking challenges—and that list is only growing.

To tackle these issues, water and wastewater managers, operators and engineers need a steady stream of easy to access and up to date information related to planning, compliance, risk, sampling results, and numerous other data points. Enterprise and custom-built industrial automations systems have promised to provide exactly that, but haven’t always delivered.

Most operators today continue to work in water data management environments that are incomplete: crucial data remains siloed and underutilized, plant operators continue to struggle with sub-optimal conditions for planning, and adopting a data-based approach to water management continues to be a challenge.

To explore the tradeoffs and sticking points operators face when approaching these challenges, we’re going to look at two different systems today:

Klir

An all-in-one cloud-based operating system for water & wastewater utilities—and more. Klir’s sampling module focuses on delivering fast and up to date water quality results and analysis, and simplifying scheduling and reporting for water monitoring plans across the utility.

Hach WIMS

A water information management solution developed by the Hach Company to complement the company’s water quality testing instruments and processes.

Klir OS and the Klir Sampling Module: A Quick Intro

Until recently, the information that operators and managers at water utilities needed to do their jobs was fragmented, dispersed across numerous systems, incomplete, or otherwise difficult to access.

Launched in 2018, Klir is the first system to bring these disparate functions together into one complete, all-in-one operating system (OS) for water & wastewater utilities.

Instead of relying on a mishmash of different systems and software, Klir brings the entire team onto one platform and pulls in data from lab reports, LIMS, SCADA & GIS to create a single source of truth for sampling activities utility-wide.

This allows operators to:

Work With Trends

See trends across the entire water system—from sampling, to permitting, inspections & more—and make decisions with clarity and confidence.

Use Automation

Automate manual tasks and data analysis that were once tracked in Excel or Outlook, from scheduling sampling runs, to interpreting sampling results, and generating regulatory reports, eliminating 1+ days of admin work each week.

Receive Alerts

Have peace of mind knowing that Klir’s automatic alerts for MCLs and non-compliance will trigger in case anything ever goes wrong, and feel confident that every sample has been completed on time.

Hach WIMS: A Quick Intro

Hach WIMS allows operators and managers to synthesize and analyze together water quality data using queries, charts and custom analytics. Think of it as a powerful version of Excel, custom-built for water.

Although Hach WIMS has been a mainstay in the water industry, it hasn’t received any major overhauls since it was originally introduced, making it very much a product of its time. While it’s helpful for users focused on managing sampling results & interpreting water quality data, it lacks some of the broader functionalities users have come to expect from newer cloud-based software.

Klir vs. Hach: Which One is Right for You?

There are a few key factors that operators need to keep in mind when choosing a system that is right for them. We’ll break them down for you below and sort them into two sections: one for operators that would be better off choosing Klir, and one for operators who might benefit from sticking to Hach.

Klir is an all-in-one system that captures all data for compliance with regulatory and local limits, and is built to handle:

• Monitoring plan creation & management
• Sample scheduling
• SCADA & LIMS import / review
• Rule validation
• Exceedance warnings
• Reporting
• Task management
• Live data entry for field sampling

Hach WIMS, on the other hand, is meant to support engineers during their daily operations and is built to handle:

• Sampling scheduling
• SCADA & LIMS import / review
• Reporting
• Equipment maintenance support
• Plant operational workflows

Reasons to choose Klir​

1. It’s a Truly Comprehensive System

It used to be that if you wanted a truly comprehensive, all-encompassing view of your organization, you had to wait for an annual report. Klir has changed that by providing operators with a complete view of the organization, allowing them to:

• Know they’re compliant, rather than assume it
• Consult a single dashboard of relevant internal and regulatory compliance when they log-in
• Avoid hunting for information across segments of data in different systems

2. It’s Bulletproof

Cybersecurity is one of the biggest threats for utilities, but these attacks often rely on very boring, unremarkable vulnerabilities. Many are simply the result of over-reliance on outdated software on local devices, or trying to integrate disparate software and systems.

IT leaders within utilities are increasingly setting mandates to reduce the complexity of their stack and are demanding higher security for the applications they choose to keep onboard. Klir provides customers with a little to no integration-required platform that operates with military-grade security.

Klir is cloud-based and can be securely accessed from any device, anywhere, offering your employees and IT managers a safe, secure and bulletproof environment to work in.

3. Maximum Accessibility

Klir focuses on providing a user-friendly, intuitive and accessible experience that is designed to be accessed and used by anyone within the utility, regardless of experience. No need to write queries or build custom dashboards: Klir makes your systems more transparent, rather than less.

Hach and other legacy industrial automation systems are built with the expert user in mind. Intuitive UI, accessibility and readability aren’t a priority in the design of these systems, which means that only water quality experts with advanced analytics knowledge and experience writing queries can get full value out of the system.

4. Built for Focused Collaboration and Task Management

Hach and other legacy systems usually don’t include internal collaboration or communications tools, forcing teams to come up with their own off-platform solutions (usually email).

While Hach focuses primarily on data management and manipulation, Klir allows teams to manage all of their tasks in-app, offering an internal chat and reply functionality, user tagging, and commenting within individual tasks, turning the platform into a single channel for collaboration across the organization.

5. Build Institutional Knowledge Instead of Individual Knowledge

Systems that require specialized expert knowledge often struggle with information ‘siloing’: when one person is out of the office or retires, they often leave a big information gap that can leave work at a standstill.

Klir fixes this problem by offering users a single source of truth that is accessible to everyone in the organization, allowing utilities to be more nimble and responsive.

Reasons Why You Might Choose Hach​

While Klir might be the clear choice for operators and managers looking for an all-in-one solution to all of their water information management needs, you might be better sticking with Hach in the following cases:

1. You Prefer a More Hands-On Approach to Analytics

Klir customers appreciate the simplicity of the tool and the ability it gives them to simply get on with their workday: from task management to automated analytics.

Hach comes with a much more customizable analytics toolbox that involves a lot more up-front work. Building your own dashboard can be a challenge, but once you do, the customizability Hach offers starts to pay off down the road with super-granular insight.

All this is to say, if you’d prefer a system that focuses primarily on data integration and custom analyses on that data, you might prefer Hach.

• Know they’re compliant, rather than assume it
• Consult a single dashboard of relevant internal and regulatory compliance when they log-in
• Avoid hunting for information across segments of data in different systems

2. You're Focused on LIMS Integration and Custom Analytics

Hach is super focused on allowing users to build detailed and robust dashboards that are deeply customizable and data-driven.

If you’re less focused on the overall operations of your facility and are focused on choosing a system that best integrates with your existing laboratory information management system (LIMS) and provides this level of customization, Hach might also fit the bill.

How Klir Can Help

Klir is a single, unified operating system for water, pulling every aspect of wastewater management—including compliance, sampling and more—into an easy to use dashboard. Learn more about how Klir can cut down on administration and record-keeping work, create new opportunities for collaboration, and provide a level of system-wide visibility unmatched by other water data management systems.