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Bringing every available data source together for convenient analysis and alerts, that’s what Smartvatten for Water Utilities is here for. By making data easily accessible and user-friendly, we hope to lighten the daily workload of the experts at water utilities, so they can focus on what matters most: finding solutions and maintaining the many pipelines and pumping stations of the wastewater network.

The Smartvatten for Water Utilities team works to support utilities in their daily challenges by combining, analyzing, and visualizing their existing data like the SCADA system measurements and external data sources like the weather data. This provides meaningful insights from the sewer network and enables the timely detection of excess water as well as anomalies like leakages or blockages. Combining and analyzing multiple data sources also helps to determine the excess water sources and to create trend analyses that can be used in making decisions regarding the prioritization of repairs and renovations, as well as regular maintenance.

Focus On the User

Digitizing water management work processes does not mean human involvement will become obsolete. Far from it: humans will always remain an essential part of the processes to maintain the entire operation. But we can make sure the repetitive, time-consuming data collection and analysis runs smoothly and efficiently, freeing up the experts’ valuable time to focus on running the network and finding solutions to every challenge.

Our cloud-based service along with our ongoing support and advice benefit your entire organization. We help your experts by locating challenges in your network, so that they can focus on solutions and proactive work. People remain at the heart of all aspects of our work. The integration of our service provides users with the opportunity to dive deeper into their network’s challenges with high quality analyses. By continuously analyzing multiple data sources and the network behavior, our application generates reports and warnings, facilitating quick follow-up steps.

Let’s look at an example from practice. Due to a defective drinking water pipe the measured amount of wastewater at a pumping station was 10 times higher than the reported drinking water consumption, and this deviation generated an I&I water alarm (Figure 1). On-site investigations revealed a defect in a neighboring drinking water pipeline. After the repair of the pipe, the flow trend of the quantity of sewage now showed a significant drop. The measured quantity, however, was still above the drinking water consumption. Further on-site investigations revealed that the wastewater pipe was also defective. When the broken sewer pipe was fixed, the waste water flow reduced to the same level as the drinking water consumption. Digital analysis combined with human effort made sure this problem was efficiently and effectively resolved.

Ongoing Relationship

To facilitate users making the most of our digital tool and combining it with their specific expertise, our solution is subscription-based: we offer ongoing support, training seminars, and follow-up meetings. Our mission is to support you and your work with innovative products to help tackle daily challenges, and we do that best by staying in close contact. At any time, there is the possibility to reach out to your contact person so we can help you utilize all the advantages of our services in your daily work. We’re also here to take away any uncertainties about the application and the associated digitization process.

We also highly value your input. It allows us to continue to develop and improve so we can serve you best. We listen closely so we can fully understand which tools you need, how and where they are used, and how we can further optimize our application so you can benefit even more from it. Last year, for example, your feedback enabled us to expand our application with an advanced I&I-water analysis module to identify the primary problems in the sewer network. For this analysis, the wastewater stream is disassembled into its individual discharge components in order to identify the excess water source — and thus the key dynamic parameters for state classification (Figure 2). It enables a reliable assessment of the status of the sewer network and can be used to make knowledge-based decisions regarding maintenance and necessary investments.

The daily workload of utilities’ specialists is high and there are always unexpected situations that pop up – and that’s not likely to change. There amount of work tends to only rise, and it’s becoming more complex and demanding. Our application helps you reduce the workload where possible by digitizing and automating the monitoring effort, so you can focus on direct problem solving rather than getting overwhelmed by finding the problems in the first place.

Want to know more about Smartvatten for Water Utilities and its services? Contact us at utilities@smartvatten.com!