"There is no life without water."

 - Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist

Municipal water utilities have one of the most important—and unappreciated—tasks in civilization. They bring water to citizens located far from rivers or streams; located instead in apartment buildings, houses and businesses along city streets and highways.

There is indeed, “no life without water.” But to be useful, that water has to be stored, distributed when needed, and contained. For most organizations today, whether commercial or municipal, there is no industrial life without data. But that data must be available, understandable and actionable. It’s amazing to learn that more than 50% of businesses (and this could include municipalities as well) have more data than they have the data analytics capacity to handle or analyze effectively.

When you’re watching a great movie it absorbs you into the story, the action and the characters. It's probably not a great movie if you find yourself thinking about other things like; “How did they get that camera angle?” Or “These are really strange sound effects" or even worse "Did I put the laundry in the dryer?" 

There’s a strong correlation between the movie production mechanics and your operations. On your computer or smart device, you want just to see the data from local and remote locations—production, measurements, down time, machine health, maintenance schedules, utility costs—or whatever, as long as it's data you can action upon to help you increase your production, safety, profits or sustainability. You don’t want to fumble around with reporting, why you’re not getting data from the sensors in the compressor, or what happened to last month’s figures. If your current system causes you to do that, you’re ready for a change.

When the real estate market is booming, home buyers will fight for virtually any house that hits the market. It's nice for sellers while it's happening, but eventually, the buyers who chose the best location will hold the properties with the greatest value. Of course there is much more to factor into your decision before committing yourself to a purchase that large; you probably have poured over the area data to see what the crime rate is, how the schools are, what the resale market holds, how far it is to conveniences, how close the neighbors are (or are not), etc...

Predicting long-term market value of anything isn't easy, but there are some tell-tale things to look for before you sign the dotted line that can help give you insight into the long-range value. The most important is of course all that data you can find today, on just about anything!

Decisions, decisions...

It's mind blowing when you think about how much time most of us spend on researching different decisions today; household purchasing decisions, cooking decisions, child care decisions, car buying decisions, vacation destination decisions, even simple things like the best way to clean something decisions - any decisions life throws our way today we grab our phone or run to the computer to look and see what are the options, best practice, best deal and then move forward.

Now, think of your employees who spend hours sorting, cleaning, detailing and organizing operational data from multiple databases, locations and spreadsheets to simplify data enough to make a least one informed business decision.

I just gave myself heartburn thinking about that.

How companies operate and use their data will significantly impact how successfully (or not) they run their operations. With Emerson's Zedi Cloud Platform, we simplify the connection between sensors to get you the data you need to make better business decisions to achieve better-performing assets, streamlined compliance, and optimized resources.

The water management industry is an asset concentrated, rate-restricted industry requiring informed decision-making to effectively  balance increased safety with capital investment and operational expenses. Capital resources for the water industries can make it difficult to meet on-going challenges like aging infrastructure, declining revenues, retiring experienced workers, and regulations.

One way water companies can face these challenges is to find effective ways to utilize their current assets to increase return on investment and increase safety. Digitally transforming operations will rely on better use of existing data coupled with new sensors, information integration, and data analytics.

In every industry, there's always room for improvement. More industries are looking to find the right data to make better business decisions and keep people and assets safer through automation and to find solutions that can change all areas of their operations for the better.

Water and wastewater treatment plants depend upon remote facilities' reliable and safe operation to continuously move waste throughout the service area to the main stations. By implementing a solution like Emerson's Zedi Cloud SCADA, many parts of managing and controlling remote sites not only become more streamlined, safer and cost effective but also more sustainable for the communities they serve.

Remember poring over page after page of perfectly normal well data, line by line, just looking for the occasional telltale anomaly that might indicate a problem requiring attention? Or copying and pasting lines of production data into a spreadsheet to track trends?

Oh, you remember that too well because—it was just this morning? So, you don’t have a way to distill all that data into a graph or chart so you can instantly spot spikes, valleys and trends?

Have you seen the dashboards on today’s cars? The information they give you is amazing—you can almost get where you’re going by watching the dashboard alone.

Zedi’s Roughneck™ software is a lot like that. It tells you the location of equipment like compressors, pumpjacks and other onsite equipment, along with pipeline inventory, preventative maintenance programs and more, so that’s what’s around you. It also lets you track moves of that equipment so your information stays current.