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Bristol Water approached us for a solution to improve the quality and availability of water resource and supply management information for operational purposes and abstraction compliance reporting. An obsolete bespoke database had to be updated to improve flexibility of graphical and printed reports, and integrate their SCADA telemetry system. Key for Bristol Water's Resource Planning Manager, Martin Berry, was to reduce staff resources in manual data entry and processing of meter readings, source outputs, compensation water discharges and reservoir storage volumes as well as being based upon a system that was scalable and capable of being expanded to meet new business requirements.
Our HydroLog4 time-series management system was ideal as the main operational database for analysing time-series records of reservoir levels, flows and metered outputs. The in-built Taskmaster Scheduler feature facilitated automation of a regular daily file transfer of SCADA telemetry data, so that information was available for further analysis much faster than previously possible. By using HydroLog4's time-series data entry and editing features, graphical and tabular reporting could be quality controlled, processed and analysed with much more speed and flexibility than previously possible. A high degree of user-customisable analysis and reporting was achieved through providing our Open Database toolkit; enabling SQL queries to be made on HydroLog4 records using VBA macros linked to a sequence of user-designed Excel spreadsheet templates for rapid summary report generation. The most recent phase of improvement was to link HydroLog4 to Bristol Water's own intranet site using the same proprietary technology as on our website www.timeview.net. The browser-driven graphical presentation features and user interface are very intuitive, so key benefits and savings are derived through reduced costs of software licence fees, user-training and IT infrastructure configuration and maintenance. Martin says that the new system has produced increased quality and cost-savings for Bristol Water as well as environmental benefits, such as reducing paper.“We are pleased with the browser tool as a way of making useful system data widely available to staff at all levels across the company. In particular, the summary plots of system water demand and reservoir volumes have increased general interest and awareness of these aspects of the business, and the ease of access to the data has been popular with those making informal or occasional use of the information.” View the full case study and illustrations |
