SCADA, Billing, and NEMWACOR…
Water companies typically have three main areas of activity in relation to potable water:
- Production
- Distribution
- Billing/customer services
Production, or water treatment, has SCADA.
Billing/customer services has Billing/CS software.
Distribution has a long list of separate systems:
- GIS for geo-location of assets
- Work and asset management (WAMS)
- Network modelling
- Leakage reporting systems
- Monitoring systems
- Control systems
- Analytics systems
- Incident management
These either need to be integrated by the utility or they need to be integrated by the market. NEMWACOR is Network Modelling and Monitoring, Work and Asset management, Analytics, Control, and Reporting. It’ll never catch on as a name! But it is certainly the future of software for the network.
Some components are already well served and are cross-industry, so these will continue to be separate components which need integrating with a core system but they do not have the functionality to become the core system. GIS and WAMS, for example. Some are highly specialised and it’s unclear yet whether they these should remain separate or be part of the core system. Network modelling, for example. But the rest benefit from being rolled up into a core system.
i2O brings together the last four areas (monitoring, control, analytics, and event management) with its dNet, oNet, iNet, and eNet suite of solutions, all built on a single platform that can ingest data from any hardware not just i2O’s, and integrates with GIS.