Introduction
A brief from the client:
Reduce workload for staff doing the Monthly Consent Compliance Report
The Wairoa District Council engaged Waugh Infrastructure Management to assist them in automating reporting from SCADA and other data sources for compliance with the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council.
Wairoa District Council believes the wastewater industry is entering a period of greater regulation and compliance reporting, and now is the time to put in place processes to automate Regional Council consent reporting and make it as less burdensome as possible.
Methodology
A series of meetings was undertaken to gather all relevant data to form a clear view of:
- What is currently happening
- What needs to happen
- What is working well
- What is not working well
Following the initial investigation, we proposed setting up a process to extract data nightly, evaluate it, and store it in a database ready for reporting.
The Solution
As much as possible, we try to use the software that the Council already owns and supports. We were able to do this with the project as well.
Telemetry data from the sewage treatment plants’ SCADA was combined with daily rainfall and tidal data from external sources.
Each morning, the previous day’s data is automatically evaluated against each consent condition.
Rainfall and tide times are also automatically downloaded from an approved website, saving staff from having to interpret or transpose this data.
This daily summary is then available in the report with data highlighted when it does not comply with the condition. Space is provided to comment on the reasons for non-compliance.
An annual summary was also provided to the Wairoa District Council to identify trends over a longer time period.
The Results
The ability to produce a monthly electronic report to the Regional Council within minutes rather than days, reducing human error and the need for manual intervention.
Below is an example of how the report appears (not actual data)
