Live Dashboards Put You in Control

Good analytics software displays relevant information about your organization, water networks, and consumers using clear graphs and charts. It doesn’t require coding or spreadsheet skills. The types of dashlets you choose to make up your dashboard could include:

• Dynamic maps of DMAs, pressure zones, or all of your network, with custom color coding and labeling of locations of strategic data points
• Time-series line graphs, showing data from sensors such as pressure loggers, depth gauges, flow meters, rain gauges, SCADA telemetry, and water quality sensors
• Weather forecasts
• Bar charts of the volumes of water supplied from the reservoirs and wells available
• Pump efficiency curves – for example, this one, for two identical pumps at a pumping station, alerted an operations manager instantly to an anomaly that could then be addressed. In another case, Info360 revealed that a pump had been wrongly set up and modeled, enabling both to be corrected

Water organizations collect a large amount of information. Usually the storage is fragmented, with the result that it doesn’t get used. Dashboarding and reporting tools can transform this data to actionable insight.

Info360 from Innovyze collects and analyzes any time series data – SCADA, sensors, and even business data such as aggregated billing information. For example, no single sensor can give you a live pump curve to tell you how efficient a pump is, compared to how it was designed to perform – and therefore whether it would be cheaper to replace the pump than continue to run it. Info360 can combine data on upstream pressure, downstream pressure, and flow, to create a live pump curve. It puts you in a better position to make the right capital expenditure decisions.

Non-revenue water (NRW) and pumping energy are often the most significant operational costs in the water business. With NRW, all the energy spent on moving it through the system is lost before it reaches customers.

Water loss is typically calculated using mass balance – the difference between inflow and outflow for the whole system or individual pressure zones (DMAs).

Dashboards can help. With Info360, you can quickly configure its Mass Balance tool for your network by dragging and dropping simple icons. It automatically pulls in the data from the relevant sensors and performs the pre-configured mathematical functions required. It runs on your live data and shows results, highlighting anything that needs your attention, such as unexpected water losses in a zone, narrowing down where the problems are – so your maintenance crews know where to head for. It also helps you prioritize maintenance and capital improvement.

Browser-based tools mean you can check your KPIs (for measures such as system reliability, NRW, billed usage, energy costs, conservation, and more) and share reports on the move. Whether you’re in the office or in the field, you can stay informed and in control.

With Info360 you don’t need to keep checking the numbers. You can set alerts, so you’ll get a text or email when a threshold is reached, enabling you to act. If you’ve got a burst, anomalous readings and alerts will provide an early warning, and you can dispatch your maintenance teams sooner – so you’re able to deliver the right service levels and reduce complaints. Info360 updates screens automatically in real time, keeping you abreast of developments.

How did your network perform yesterday? Last week? The last time there was prolonged cold weather? Reporting tools that access your historian database provide answers immediately, to highlight anomalies that need investigation.

Info360 can do all of this, plus useful analysis like superimposing on a single graph the pump performance for today (green) compared to last year (orange) and to the manufacturer’s curve (blue). This gave one water district an instant indication of performance degradation and how the pump was moving towards the end of its useful life.

You can also connect Info360 to your hydraulic model. Feed in your model’s predictions and you can check the model vs actuals as the day plays out; or use the model to simulate the status at a point in the network without a sensor.

Most Info360 users like their dashboards so much that they paste screenshots into their reports. They arrange their dashboards to show the information they need both day-to-day and for reporting.

Info360 can also generate fully configurable reports, giving you even more options for how your data is visualized and presented.  These reports can be automatically generated on any desired timeframe to satisfy reporting for management, regulations, compliance, and other purposes.