Tag Archives: SCADA

FlowWorks Part of NEWEA 2012 Exhibitor Showcase

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FlowWorks was pleased to present at the 2012 New England Water Environment Association (NEWEA) annual conference and exhibition as part of the new “Exhibitor’s Series”.  The 30-minute presentation, titled “Using FlowWorks With SCADA Systems”, was given by FlowWorks president Timothy Hicks.  In the presentation he discussed how the FlowWorks web platform can be used to create a collaborative engineering environment where engineers and managers can work directly with monitoring data without risk of compromising the SCADA system.  “The publicity for the Exhibitor Series was a little light”, said Hicks, “so the crowd was too, but the folks who came seemed interested and asked good questions which is always my sign they thought I was worth the time.”

The presentation was part of the NEWEA annual conference, January 24 -25 at the Boston Marriott Copley Place Hotel.  NEWEA has been holding annual meetings to provide a forum for knowledge and technology exchange within the wastewater field since 1928.  The conference has since become New England’s largest water quality conference.

More information on the NEWEA can be found on the NEWEA website.

For a copy of Mr. Hicks’ presentation, please contact FlowWorks.

FlowWorks is Featured in Treatment Plant Operator Magazine

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FlowWorks is featured in the January 2012 issue of Treatment Plant Operator (TPO) magazine. On page 49 in the Product News section, FlowWorks is shown along with an image of the Graphic Editing screen. TPO explains that FlowWorks “enables users to highlight data directly on time-series, scatter graphs or in tables, then flip to an editing screen.” Flowworks also saves a complete history of all edits with notes allowing users to reverse changes at any time. FlowWorks collects data from any flow meter plus SCADA, USGS and NOAA environmental stations. It is good to see that we are being recognized!

You can check out the digital copy of TPO here!

India Is Onto Something!

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Balaji Automation, an Indian manufacturer and supplier of auto and electrical control systems, is now offering SCADA control panels that can be connected to FlowWorks. From their website:

 “FlowWorks is not just for data loggers and does a lot more than store and plot data”

Indeed, readers know that FlowWorks is a collaborative data management platform that can be used to combine environmental data with SCADA data to help make sense of it all. Once all the data is together, it can easily be monitored and alarmed across all inputs including SCADA inputs. Users can even set and acknowledge notifications and alarms from anywhere via a secure internet connection without needing to involve IT. Once connected, users can access the FlowWorks reporting tools to produce graphs and summary tables for reports. Using their SCADA data, users can generate reports on water consumption, water quality, rainfall statistics and IDF curves, pump run times, chemical injection summaries, and more.

And most importantly, FlowWorks provides data viewing and analysis tools only. There are none of the control functions typically associated with SCADA. When engineers and managers are viewing SCADA data in FlowWorks from your SCADA system, it is a mirrored copy of the data rather than the original data itself. Your SCADA system and network remain secure – always.

You can read more about using FlowWorks with your SCADA system 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 in the News: Water Efficiency Magazine

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FlowWorks gets a nice mention in the November/December 2011 issue of Water Efficiency Magazine! In “High Level Applications”, Dan Rafter writes how SCADA systems determine peak water usage, how they identify system leaks, and increase efficiency while reducing operating Costs. On page 16 in the Supplementing SCADA section, Rafter writes about how FlowWorks helps SCADA system presentation and data analysis capabilities. Timothy Hicks, president of FlowWorks, explains in the article how the combination of SCADA and FlowWorks online data analysis tools is the best way to manage water delivery systems.

FlowWorks provides a way to put any SCADA data, including sewer flow meters, treatment plant SCADA, and rainfall data collected from dataloggers together into a coherent visual display.

You can check out an online version of Water Efficiency Magazine’s November/December 2011 issue here!

You can also learn more about using FlowWorks with SCADA here here!

FlowWorks: A True One-Stop Monitoring Shop

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Flow monitoring must be efficient in order to truly be effective. With that in mind, FlowWorks continues to promote the ease of accessing all data sources in one location. We now have the ability to add real-time United States Geological Survey (USGS) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) station data into our already- robust flow monitoring network.

The additional data is comprehensive:

  • Precipitation
  • Groundwater level
  • Streamflow
  • Surface water quality
  • Tide data

The upgrades bring more than 2,500 USGS precipitation stations, 9,000 streamflow stations, 1,300 groundwater level stations and 1,900 surface water quality stations to FlowWorks users. And, NOAA allows access to almost 50 real-time tide data streams. It’s all just keystrokes away. For a list of available stations in your area click here for USGS and here for NOAA.

This real-time data is typically recorded at 15- to 60-minute intervals, stored onsite, and then transmitted to USGS offices every one to four hours, depending on the data relay technique used. Recording and transmission times may be more frequent during critical events. Plus, data from real-time sites are relayed to USGS offices via satellite, telephone, and/or radio telemetry and are available for viewing within minutes of arrival.

The benefits are impressive. In essence, FlowWorks analysis and reporting tools enable more useful information to be captured from the USGS stations. For example, clients are able to enhance their existing rain gauge network with all available stations in their monitoring area, which increases access to spatial and temporal storm information.

Gwinnett County in Georgia is using this service to bring the 18 local USGS rainfall stations into their FlowWorks platform in addition to the 12 rainfall stations coming in from their SCADA system.  The result will be a dramatic improvement in their understanding of local rainfall conditions.

Implementing these new features—additional data—from FlowWorks requires just a small one-time setup fee and no monthly charges. More importantly, accessing all your data in one spot, and in real time, will improve the decision-making process perhaps more than any other upgrade a firm could make.