5 Important Considerations That Can Help Advance Your Water Utility’s Digital Transformation

Water utilities have no shortage of data. In fact, they have many complicated enterprise systems and an increasing amount of operational IIoT data to manage. They face constant pressure to deal with their data effectively. However, some business challenges require in-depth insights that can only come from integrated data. As a result, there is an increasing need for water utilities to adapt new digital solutions to manage day-to-day operations and capital planning decisions. So, what is the most effective way for utilities to leverage digital solutions to drive intelligent water asset management and capital planning decisions? Here are five important considerations that can help advance your water system’s digital transformation.?

1.??????A digital journey can start at any point of an asset’s lifecycle.

From planning to design to construction, including the operation and maintenance phase, there are many ways to leverage digital solutions. For example, by implementing water distribution system data integration and operational analytics, utilities can bring various critical data sources into a single environment. This provides a holistic view and insights of present, historic, and forecast performance for every asset within the system without the need to use different software or tools, which don’t communicate with each other.

2.??????Having a strategic vision.

It is key to define the applications, the people, the processes, and data analytics that can create efficiencies, solve day-to-day problems, help your team, and improve the level of customer service. There can be multiple enterprise software systems and databases that are integrated to provide operational digital solutions with analytics and key performance indicators. These may include anomaly detection, alert notification, pump, tank and water quality performance information, nonrevenue water audit, real-time operational event model simulation capabilities, etc. A common mistake is to integrate certain enterprise data before first identifying and prioritizing the desired near-term and long-term business applications. Having a strategic vision will dramatically save your team time by integrating only the key datasets that align with the strategic plan.

3.??????Understanding internal resources to implement and manage digital software solutions.

It is important to know if you have the right resources to develop, deploy, and manage software solutions in-house. Or, if you should maintain and improve your enterprise system data that is managed externally and provided as a Software as a Service (SaaS). One of the pros of in-house development is that the utility would have in-depth knowledge of its own infrastructure and systems, and this creates a lot of efficiencies. In most cases, however, the pros for utilizing an external vendor/SaaS far outweigh the pros of in-house options especially because many utilities lack the resources to manage a unified digital platform, and thus require external support and expertise.

4.??????A digital solution must be flexible.

The software should provide not only operational analytics and key performance indicators in the form of dashboards, but also allow the user to create custom dashboards and additional indicators and data visualization reports. This will give the user flexibility. For example, you can run a hydraulic, real-time model, see the results, but you can also export that data to be used in offline modeling for further investigations and additional scenario analysis.

5.??????A digital solution must be scalable.

Many water utilities already have a lot of digital components that operate their water infrastructure, including GIS, hydraulic model, SCADA, IIoT, or work order management systems. What is often not understood is how to integrate all data into a unified digital solution that can help solve everyday utility problems. A digital solution should be scalable without limitations in size or number of sensors. Utilities should be able to start small by testing a pilot area and then continue to build a complete system. Every water utility has its own digital journey. The scalability of an effective digital solution allows you to make decisions and define priorities aligned with the organization’s core values, but also in accordance with where it stands in its digital process.