The water management industry continues to be plagued by multiple challenges, including aging infrastructure combined with an aging workforce that puts our water supply systems at even greater risk due to the loss of critical expertise and other hurdles like natural disasters including wildfires, floods, and drought that can significantly impact the safety of our water systems.

Water management operations will need to unleash the value of data by using analytics and other technologies to drive better decision-making, optimize and prioritize system investments, and drive cost efficiencies that create safer operations.

If you're in production operations, you don't think of 'alarms' the way most people do. Most people think of 'alarms' as annoying devices that wake them up in the morning. Which sure, has a great purpose in itself. But alarms in production operations can save miles, and more importantly lives when handled with care and by a trustworthy tech partner like DeltaV™ SaaS SCADA.

Is your company still sending a pumper out to visually inspect every well? If so, I’m sure you’ve counted the miles and hours, not to mention the costs for fuel, tires and oil changes.

For years now we’ve been able to monitor tank levels, compressors, pump operations and flow meters. Most of that is pretty cut-and-dried. The tank is at whatever level it’s at; the pump is either running or it’s not. An alarm tells us what we need to know the minute we need to know it.

But detecting a pipeline leak involves combining a number of data points and deciding which ones, or which combination of points, means there really is a leak. I’m stressing “really” because the industry first believed any anomaly needed to be alarmed because at that point an anomaly equaled leak, and we defiantly know the faster that leak could be stopped, and repaired; the more profits from your production ended up staying in your pocket.

Remote locations with industrial assets that don't have anyone locally monitoring performance need alarms (for starters). Alarms can be used to monitor data for anything out of the ordinary, catching smaller deviations, and alerting an operator to a possible situation before it escalates. When it comes to effective remote operations management, there are few better tools available than alarming capabilities.