Don’t flush away your customer data

As a water utility you have a vast network of assets, people and customers to take care of. You may have miles of pipelines, millions of customers, thousands of individual water meters, hundreds of pumps and dozens of reservoirs. If there is an accident or a leak it can take engineers hours – even days – to find the problem and deal with it.

In the meantime, water is lost, customers don’t get served and people’s lives could be at risk. If a toxic substance was accidentally or deliberately added to a reservoir on a major city’s network, for example, millions of customers could be made ill.

Emergency procedures would include stopping pumping stations and shutting down pipelines. Customers would have to be warned, with notices to boil water or follow emergency procedures if they are ill. Police and hospitals would have to be alerted, insurance companies notified. The list of to-dos goes on.

If you do not deal with the problem quickly, efficiently and compassionately your reputation goes down the drain.

There are steps you can take, and they involve better use of your customer data. Knowing where your customers live on the grid, how to best contact them, whether they are at home at the time – all these things could help save lives and your reputation. Gathering and analysing this data, while also being compliant with privacy laws, complicates the process.

Having a predetermined process workflow for emergencies is also necessary, but this must have the flexibility to change given different circumstances. Here is where a digital twin could help; a computerised companion that mirrors the state of your physical assets, giving you an opportunity to test and respond to any possible event and then prepare more effectively.

An effective digital twin can also combine customer data with documented operating procedures to guide an engineer through each step of the process they need to follow to ensure safety and compliance. Software AG’s ARIS platform includes this capability and also offers the option to enforce “read and understood” messages to audit engineers and ensure they have completed their tasks in the right order.

But it’s not just in the event of an emergency that having easy access to information about your asset base is important. Having instant visibility of information like site plans, equipment lists, emergency contacts, method statements, access protocols, and so on would add value to your field engineers in myriad ways, significantly boosting productivity and bringing new levels of efficiency to routine operations right across your asset base every day.