Water sector finds less is more

Industry regulators now require water companies to support their investment plans with data packaged in required formats, and to adopt whole-life asset management systems that combine asset and capital expenditure accounting.
In response, the UK water industry has been networking SCADA systems together to transmit huge amounts of data to head office computer systems.
However, head office managers have found much of the extra data irrelevant or hard to understand, delegates heard at the recent ‘Driving Innovations in the Water Industry conference, hosted by Mitsubishi Electric.
For instance a data streamshowing that a pump in a remote station had been switching on and off regularly for the last six months, may lead a head office middle manager to think: ‘It ain’t broke, so best not fix it. Whereas a field engineer with a bit more affinity for machinery would probably know to check the pump.
This highlighted the need to let the users develop their own sub-systems and thus create an architecture that builds capability rather than warehouses data, Mark Narbrough of systems firm Gromtimj said at the event.
“Often the data is actually available on their system but it needs re-packaging into a format with which they are comfortable,” said Narbrough.
Narbrough went on to explain that when designing a system, each user must be asked what data they need, how often they need updates, how they process the information and what actions they initiate. They also, he said, need to explain how their activities fit into the company-wide system.
“We only collect data that is going to be converted into usable information, and we tend to report by exception rather than event - which is often the difference between data and information.”
Scottish Water is rolling out such a system across the Highland and Islands: field engineers visiting remote sites are filing records on tablet PCs rather than on paper as the utility builds a digital platform that will eventually network the whole organisation.
“We have run a pilot at over 100+ sites,” said Sheila Campbell-Lloyd, waste water operations manager for the North region. “With the old paper system, central records could be months out of date.
“Currently the graphics on the tablet PCs are similar to the old charts and everybody has really taken to them. They are collecting the same data and the software is producing reports on process results, task schedules, routine and non-routine maintenance, energy, health & safety and environmental parameters.”
If everything seems okay, the reports are archived, but if there are indicators of potential issues a pre-emptive instruction is sent to either the engineer or to the centralised intelligent control centre.
The tablets are ‘intelligent’ and will alert the engineer if data is out of expected limits. Better use is already being made of data and later in the project the data collection will become more detailed, leading to a further improvement in management efficiency.
Ten years ago this level of systems integration would have been little short of science fiction but with today’s plug-and-go technology it is perfectly achievable, as Jeremy Shinton of Mitsubishi Electric explained.
“Manufacturing enterprise systems connect real-time technical data into high level business systems and they are simple to implement using state of the art modular PLCs … These have a central processor unit plus a rack onto which you simply mount speciality modules, to create a bespoke controller for each situation.”