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FlowWorks in the News: Water Efficiency Magazine

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Amelia Eierdam

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!

Compliance with Consent Decrees Made Easier by FlowWorks

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Timothy Hicks

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.

FlowWorks in the UK

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Erin Taylor

FlowWorks Team Makes a Splash at the WaPUG Autumn Conference

The FlowWorks team is home after a successful trip to the United Kingdom for the Wastewater Planning Users Group (WaPUG) conference.

The primary topic for discussion during the two-day wastewater and urban drainage event in Blackpool was “What does the future hold—the next five years.”

FlowWorks President Timothy Hicks flew into the UK a few days ahead of time for meetings and to attend the Water, Wastewater and Environmental Monitoring (WWEM) tradeshow in Telford before picking up FlowWorks Operations Manager Craig Kipkie at the Manchester Airport. The English roads made for adventure as the two missed the turn onto the M6 and found themselves traversing the rural roads of the Wirral. After some hasty map reading, they made it through the Mersey Tunnel and onto the streets of Liverpool, where they were able to locate an excellent pub set against the back wall of Goodison park. Once they were fed, it made for a fun and scenic excursion, Hicks said.

Safe and sound in Blackpool, the FlowWorks team met up with colleagues from Detectronic and IETG, owned by ADS, the firm’s partner in the Seattle Public Utilities Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) project. There was much discussion about upcoming projects and plans for using FlowWorks.

Hicks and Kipkie led numerous demonstrations, including what was easily the largest demonstration of the show Thursday evening when they shared online data, live via the FlowWorks site, to a crowd of about 20. The team continued to offer demonstrations and answer questions even as the show was being cleaned up around them on the last day.

Craig Kipkie demonstrates how to use FlowWorks data analysis tools on live field data.

The team also spent time with Detectronic and IETG folks, teaching them the inner workings of the FlowWorks platform—so much so that both firms have been designated as FlowWorks Technical Experts since they now possess a depth of knowledge about the tools and how to effectively employ them.

“All in all, it was a fabulous trade show,” Hicks said. “Three days of really good conference.”

The tradeshow was a unique opportunity to connect with the UK market. The market is highly sophisticated, since the level of modeling going on nationwide is uniformly high and very different from that of the United States because it is operated by ten large, privatized water boards. The result is that all firms in the industry are working ultimately for one or more of the ten water boards.

Craig Kipkie of FlowWorks and Ian Small of Mott MacDonald discuss the details of FlowWorks CSO management tools.

Hicks highlighted plenty of positives, weather aside, and thoroughly enjoyed the trip, he said,

“We had a really great show and met exactly the people we needed to meet and had great conversations and demonstrations with many of them. The people were awesome, the food was great, the venue was good for the purpose, Blackpool was marginally acceptable and the weather was awful. Short of fixing the weather and attracting so many more of the RIGHT kind of attendees that the event outgrows Blackpool, I am not sure the organizers could have done anything more”

Look for FlowWorks at the WaPUG Conference again next year.

Seattle Public Utilities Joins FlowWorks

Posted on December 10, 2010 by Craig Kipkie

FlowWorks is proud to announce a new partnership with Seattle Public Utilities and ADS Environmental Services to provide the city’s new flow-monitoring services. As part of the new combined sewer overflow (CSO) program, we will work closely with the city and ADS to oversee flow monitoring and data management.

SPU chose FlowWorks because of our proven ability to gather data into one place so CSO events can be analyzed quickly, understood and communicated to all users. Operating in near-real time, SPU’s new FlowWorks service easily loads two years of 5-minute data from the server in under 6 seconds. Already the city is enjoying better collaboration, faster problem solving and quicker response times.

Other highlights our service brings to the new partnership include:

• Secure, internet-based platform
• Used for gathering, analyzing and managing water, sewer, rainfall and other remote data Hardware neutral
• Accepts data from any flow meter or manufacturer’s data system, as well as SCADA, Historic and manual data
• Includes powerful graphing engine, storage for all forms of meta data, event alarms and analysis capabilities for I&I and rainfall IDF

ADS develops and provides technology-based flow measurement products and services for the water, wastewater and hydroelectric industries. The firm is a veteran of working with SPU and has provided excellent flow servicing, engineering, and a high degree of data integrity to the utility for the past five years. When the contract came up for re-bid, SPU leadership recognized the need to add a robust data-delivery and work order management system to the program—FlowWorks was a natural choice. Already the team of FlowWorks and ADS has proven to be exactly what SPU was looking for and together we help to build on past success with SPU.

FlowWorks continually proves to be the platform of choice for municipalities, utilities and industrial clients seeking to manage, analyze and understand large quantities of remote data quickly, and securely communicate the results to a broad audience.

For more information, please visit our website at www.flowworks.com or to learn more about ADS visit www.adsenv.com.

Field Equipment – Standard vs. Daylight Savings Time

Posted on August 19, 2009 by Jason Vine

We are often asked by our clients why we always program data collection systems in the field in Standard time, and why we never collect or show data in Daylight Savings Time. The main reason is for long-term consistency, and it usually only gets appreciated years later when all of that great data gets looked at by someone doing a multi-year study. Here’s an example:

A client has been using FlowWorks for several years, and is now ready to do some sewer inflow & infiltration (I&I) analysis work. The client downloads a block of data, or uses the FlowWorks I&I analysis tool for this purpose.

When you do this type of analysis, you remove a dry weather flow pattern template from the total flow data. It is essential that all of the data be in Standard Time, otherwise you run the risk of using dry and wet weather templates that are shifted relative to each other by 1 hour (dry weather often being taken when Daylight Savings Time is in effect, while wet weather events are often during Standard Time). The result is sometimes subtle and difficult to see, but often leads to the wrong answers being generated in the analysis.

We’ve seen this happen with lots of other applications:

- Operations staff will look at data and want to know when the early morning low sewage flow comes, in order to plan for some maintenance work in the pipe. Not being sure if the data is in Standard or Daylight time causes confusion. On FlowWorks, nearly everything is always in Standard time.

- Comparing data from 2 different rain and storm sewer stations (one running in Standard Time, the other in Daylight) causes confusion and puts a 1 hour error on the timing of the rain peak relative to the storm peak.

Whenever we have a choice, we always run our data collection platforms in Standard Time as we feel it is best practice, and avoids as much confusion as possible. It is true that there is an inconvenience associated with all of the data being stored in standard time, usually when the data is being used for very casual review by someone who is not used to Standard Time, or if trying to pin down the time that an actual event (such as a sewer overflow) occurred. However, we feel the long-term benefits of keeping everything on the same time signal outweigh the inconveniences. If you find you have an application where you absolutely must have the correction for Daylight time applied to your data, talk to us! We do have some workarounds for you.