Water management is becoming increasingly complex and demands an urgent review to ensure sustainable service delivery and contribution to economic growth to meet present and future needs. The Blue Drop Certification programme which recognises municipalities whose drinking water quality meets the set criteria has become a strong initiative and prerequisite for excellence. Adroit reports that its systems are currently used by 15 of the 20 some municipalities that have been credited with Blue Drop status for managing and delivering a water solution that exceeds the government’s national quality management standards.
UGU District Municipality is responsible for the supply of bulk water and waste water services to the South Coast and inland regions of KwaZulu-Natal. From Scottburgh to Port Edward and as far inland as Jolivet and Harding, UGU District Municipality identified a need to provide operations and management with an information system capable of giving both snapshots of current system status, performance indicators as well the ability to provide stakeholders with relevant reports. The system was required to contextualise data taken from the Adroit Scada system, manually captured and data captured at the call centre. This data needed to be stored in a data warehouse designed for analysis and reporting of both the Blue Drop requirements, as well as local operational needs.
Adroit Technologies designed and deployed a data warehouse solution that accommodated all the requirements. Using Microsoft SQL Server and the latest in data warehousing design, the solution is both flexible and offers built-in data contextualisation capability. Malcolm Heathfield of Adroit who spearheaded the project comments, “One thing lacking in realtime data and standard historians or even relational database designs is that they are essentially one dimensional in time. Reporting and analysis relies heavily on the ability to group, sort and aggregate data in order to turn it into information. This is a massive challenge with a large amount of realtime data which only has context in terms of time. We have developed a system which allows users to apply context to the processes, processing this raw data and storing the results in a data warehouse that supports reporting and analysis.”
Mthokozisi Ncube, senior manager: Water Services Operations at UGU adds, “We want to be a premier supplier of water services and believe a strong knowledge strategy is important. Future efficiency improvements will be gained by uncovering those relationships that can only be discovered using modern business intelligence tools. Adroit has delivered us a platform that will support us as a forward thinking utility.”
The system has various sources of data, namely:
* Scada data from the Adroit servers – recently upgraded to version 7.0.
* Manually captured data from the treatment and waste water sites.
* Data captured at the UGU call centre.
Data from the scada for the bulk water reticulation system essentially consists of reservoir levels, pump running and trip signals and communication status of the RTUs. The manually captured data is mainly concerned with quality and chemical consumption.
The solution comprises the Adroit servers, the Adroit data warehouse solution, OPUS as the reporting software and the VIZNET Information Portal that brings it all together in a single unified user interface. The system overview is a dashboard of the operations measuring processes such as water treatment plant status, bulk water storage and pump station and wastewater treatment plant status.
Mthokozisi Ncube adds: “We are very excited about the future and in Adroit Technologies found a reliable partner that understood our needs and has delivered a complex solution, on time that will allow us to provide better quality and service delivery to our customers in the future.”
Dave Wibberley, MD of Adroit concludes, “We are extremely passionate about the water industry. This solution has been designed to be flexible and scalable so that even our smallest customers will be able to benefit from the pioneering work we have done with UGU. With 15 of the 22 municipalities currently accredited with Blue Drop status already using Adroit, we believe this platform will be able to help all municipalities to improve their operations going forward.”
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| Email: | [email protected] |
| www: | www.adroit.co.za |
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