Tag Archives: Data collection

FlowWorks Featured in Municipal Sewer & Water Magazine

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FlowWorks is making waves once again. This time by being featured in the February/March 2012 issue of Municipal Sewer & Water. Ted J. Rulseh writes in the Technology Test Drive column about FlowWorks in an article titled, “All Flowing Together”. The article describes how FlowWorks can save both time and money by cutting down the tedium and unnecessary steps involved in data monitoring.

On page 58, Ted summarizes his observations by saying “It was easy to see how the graphic, reporting and calculation capabilities in FlowWorks could save engineers from significant amounts of tedious work. The various reporting and calculation functions appeared to be intuitive, at least for an engineer or other professional experienced in sewer system operations and planning”. Tim Hicks, president of FlowWorks, is also quoted in the article, saying of FlowWorks’ abilities, “Turn weeks of spreadsheet work into a couple of hours of FlowWorks work”.

An online version of the Technology Test Drive article featuring FlowWorks can be found here!

FlowWorks Welcomes Cincinnati

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The city of Cincinnati is the latest municipality to join FlowWorks. The city is beginning the process of moving all environmental monitoring data to the FlowWorks web platform where it will be securely stored, edited, analyzed and turned into actionable information.

In the fall of 2010, when ADS Environmental Services was bidding flow monitoring services to Cincinnati they asked FlowWorks to team with them for data management. ADS knew from their successful partnership for Seattle that FlowWorks would help them deliver superior quality data and save time and money in the process.

ADS was successful and Cincinnati awarded contracts to provide flow services for capital improvement and other modeling projects. At present, this includes flow servicing, data management and QA/QC for over 200 monitoring stations. The data is being uploaded directly to FlowWorks, where it will be combined with other Cincinnati environmental data including historic flow metering stations, rain gauges, SCADA pump stations, and CSO/SSO sites.

Check back soon for more information including how FlowWorks is helping Cincinnati and other municipalities worldwide achieve the most efficient and comprehensive flow monitoring possible.

FlowWorks Creates Big Buzz at WEFTEC 2011

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WEFTEC 2011, Los Angeles

Attendees at the 2011 Water Environment Federation’s Annual Technical Exhibition and Conference, WEFTEC, repeatedly asked a key question as they stopped by the FlowWorks booth: How do I sign up?

“Hundreds of people stopped by the booth,” said FlowWorks President Timothy Hicks. “People are definitely getting the message that FlowWorks is the better way to manage data.”

Held October 15-19 at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California, WEFTEC is the largest meeting of its kind in North America, bringing together thousands of water quality professionals from around the world to share and explore the best water quality education and training available.

FlowWorks booth was a highlight. Representatives from the nation’s biggest engineering companies, a dozen major west cost municipalities, most of the world’s flow metering firms, as well as the members of the media and investment bankers, were among those who crowded around the booth’s two demonstration screens.

“FACE and the new graphic editor were extremely well received,” Hicks noted. “I think folks were so receptive because they’re starting to understand that a platform like FlowWorks can truly bring data and people together.  After two years of speaking and educating, they are seeing a way to keep their data secure, and access and work with it at the same time.  Fortunately, they’re thinking of us.”

In other words, people are finally understanding how to deal with the vast amount of environmental monitoring data that’s piling up, and that FlowWorks offers a management approach that is far more cost-effective, efficient, and comprehensive than traditional SCADA.

The new tools have been a smash hit so far:

  • Graphic Editing QA/QC Tools—Users can now edit any and all data, on a single, secure web platform, from anywhere.
  • FlowWorks Advanced Calculation Engine (FACE)—A major upgrade to the FlowWorks data platform places Excel-quality calculation tools for real-time data directly into user’s hands.

The updates vastly expand FlowWorks data management, analysis and reporting capabilities.

The message for flow monitoring professionals of the world: FlowWorks has arrived—and 2012 looks like it is going to be a very busy year.

For more information on FlowWorks, including the new Graphic Editing QA/QC Tools or FACE, please click the links.

FlowWorks Welcomes FTS as a New Data Partner

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FlowWorks is pleased to announce that users can now connect directly to Axiom™ data loggers made by FTS.  Often used for hydrology, and a prominent in North American fire weather station networks where extreme duty is required, the touch-screen enabled Axiom loggers are well known for their rugged reliability and simplicity of operation. Users of FTS loggers can now access their data directly through FlowWorks using either GOES or Globalstar satellite telemetry.  For the first time, users of this respected logger can access all the power of FlowWorks.

As an example, combining data from FTS Axiom data loggers with the extreme power of FACE, FlowWorks Advanced Calculation Engine, allows users to perform real-time calculations on any incoming data stream. The possibilities are nearly limitless, ranging from combining data at multiple locations into a single algebraic or logic equation, to writing complex alarming rules spanning entire networks.  In addition, because FlowWorks is hardware-neutral, data from FTS equipment can easily be combined with data from any other data logger, SCADA system and USGS or NOAA station.

FlowWorks combines powerful graphing tools with robust analysis capabilities including I&I, rainfall IDF, CSO monitoring with multi-station alarming, and storage for all forms of metadata. The addition of FTS data allows FlowWorks clients the option to combine it with other monitoring data for a dramatically improved understanding of local conditions and how they affect water and sewer networks.

You can learn more about FlowWorks and our partnership with FTS here.

Compliance with Consent Decrees Made Easier by FlowWorks

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The FlowWorks web platform is giving water utilities, municipalities, consultants and industrial clients a powerful, flexible tool for integrating and presenting all their operational data. FlowWorks makes compliance with a consent decree faster, more accurate and more comprehensive than conventional systems by securely delivering a wealth of online data, monitoring, analyses, and near-real-time reporting to all interested users. Facility management is more efficient, and compliance is enhanced.

The FlowWorks data management and reporting platform addresses a number of issues critical to consent decree compliance:

  •  Accurate Reporting of Operational Status. The FlowWorks system gathers functional data from all hardware platforms, integrates and analyzes the cumulative data, and creates a broad range of graphical reports for an accurate picture of the total system operations.
  •  Event Analysis and Response. FlowWorks provides the means to establish alarms in the event of system non-compliance. When such an alarm is triggered, the system generates an analysis of the event, and provides facility managers with the information to correct the condition and improve overall facility performance and compliance.
  • Communication with All Users. Consent decrees often involve the participation of a range of user groups: governmental, environmental, judiciary, public and private audiences. FlowWorks enables facility managers to communicate across multiple platforms with a range of graphical reporting tools, ensuring that verifiable consent decree compliance is accurately communicated to all interested parties.

“We needed to manage problems and track their resolution in a way that can share information instantly,” says the CSO monitoring team leader for a major west-coast utility. “These problems are quite complex and require a lot of interaction. One of the big benefits of the FlowWorks platform is that when analysts are screening data from our temporary or permanent rain gauge sites and identify a problem that they would like to address, we can immediately refer that problem to the contractor and track the resolution.”

You can read more about using FlowWorks with to manage compliance with a consent decree here.

Quantifying I&I with FlowWorks

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If you are responsible for operating a sanitary sewer system, you know tracking Inflow and Infiltration (I&I) is crucial. However, even with the best data this can be a challenging and sometimes tedious task without the tools to extract useful information from it. This is where FlowWorks comes in.

You have stations monitoring sewers and rainfall all over the city. The challenge for planners and engineers is to use this data to predict I&I in order to implement the required facilities or assess the results of infrastructure rehabilitation. To do this, a host of data is considered and some complex and often tedious calculations are undertaken. The versatile I&I tools in FlowWorks simplify many of the tasks required in I&I analysis, preventing errors and making the task actually tolerable (we won’t go so far as to say enjoyable!)  For those of us who used to do all of this in Excel spreadsheets, the first time you see FlowWorks do in seconds what used to take hours can be very exciting!. The program has already helped municipalities and consultants avoid potential overflows and resulting fines, which can come at a high cost to both the local environment and community.

For each storm event, FlowWorks takes into account Ground Water Infiltration (GWI) and Base Sanitary Flow (BSF), collectively known as Dry Weather Flow (DWF), and subtracts it from the total flow in the sanitary sewer to come up with Rainfall Induced I&I (RDII). This may not sound like a lot of effort, but when it has to be done manually across many stations and storm events it can easily add up to many hours of grueling, error-prone calculations.

Once you’ve accumulated an adequate number of storm events, FlowWorks will quickly handle plotting of an I&I envelope or the Q vs I relationship, giving you the relationship between I&I and rainfall so that return-period based I&I flows can be estimated.

All I&I analysis data can be saved for later reference or comparison and can be published for any audience, public or private. For those who have multiple monitoring sites, a seasonal set up, which includes dates of storms, dry weather patterns, etc., can be easily transferred between sites to avoid the hassles of setting up multiple sites.

If you haven’t tried out the I&I tools yet on some of your data, we encourage you to give it a try (use of the I&I tools is included in your subscription).