Local water utilities often face the challenge of operating water supply networks and ensuring the quality standards of the services with limited budgets and resources.
Unlike large corporations, these utilities must pick their everyday battles wisely, focusing and prioritizing their actions while taking into account the resources they have available.
Infrastructure is expensive and it is expected to last. If you fail to accurately consider changes in the demand patterns or ignore the capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenses (OPEX), your investment will also fail to get the return on investment.
For these utilities, the ability to plan and foresee the impact, changes, and outcomes that the infrastructure will face is critical to ensure financial health and returns on investments made.
If you manage a local utility and want to grow your planning capabilities and increase your operational efficiency you certainly have these three topics in your top priorities:
Do more with less
Every growing business strives to churn more out of what they have, and your utility is no different.
Instead of wasting time and human resources with under optimized tools that require lots of time to properly evaluate all different scenarios and alternatives and even longer to review and find mistakes, consider WaterGEMS, a proven and optimized solution that will reduce the time and effort to plan, analyze and design water networks.
WaterGEMS provides an easy-to-use environment that will make these tasks easier and quicker, so your team can focus on other urgent tasks.
Do you want to deliver better output with the least cost? You can easily and quickly do that with Darwin Designer. Darwin Designer is a module in WaterGEMS that lets you find the most cost-effective design alternative with minimum effort and time.
Besides that, with the Keys that are included in every Virtuoso subscription, you get access to expert services and tailored training to get the most out of every working moment and use each software application to its fullest potential.
Lean Operation by Reducing OPEX
Reducing operational costs by decreasing the pump energy consumption and the non-revenue water will increase your operational efficiency, which means that fewer resources (human, natural, and financial) will be wasted, therefore these resources will be available to be used in more fruitful and useful efforts.
One of the biggest expenses of small utilities lies in energy consumption. You can address this with Darwin Scheduler, a feature in WaterGEMS that uses genetic algorithm optimization to control pumps to save and reduce energy costs.
Darwin Calibrator will allow you to save money by locating potential sources of leakage or another non-revenue water usage. By adjusting the emitter coefficient (a pressure-dependent demand) to match the field data, you can detect leakage hot spots.
Being Thoughtful of CAPEX
Local utilities must plan their capital expenses in advance to make sure they allocate their money and resources properly. One important aspect of capital expense includes analyzing and choosing design alternatives that will cost less and at the same time stay efficient in face of future expected urban verticalization.
Darwin Designer can be applied to determine the size of rehabilitation action for pipes. It also follows you to design new pipe layouts or pipe rehabilitation for existing pipes. A genetic algorithm-based approach will help you avoid manual trial and error to find the most efficient and cost-effective design.
Wrap Up
WaterGEMS is a very effective solution to help local utilities become “growing” utilities. It helps you to reduce operational costs and inefficiencies. At the same time, it improves your planning and analysis capabilities, enabling long-term and better decision-making. WaterGEMS will not only save your engineering hours, it will also help you to maximize your investments in the infrastructure that’s built to last.
