Our client is a Central North Island district council. They are required to provide regular compliance information about drinking water standards to the regional council.

The information that needed to be collected came from more than 10 remote geographical sites each running independent and different control systems. Also, much of the software being used was not designed to meet the requirements of a connected network.

We knew that introducing a new common system at each site would be prohibitively expensive for the council. So we shifted the goalposts and developed a solution using a centralised reporting server.

All the remote sites continue to collect data locally as normal, then despatch it via email or cloud based file transfer. The central server retrieves the information, and with smart queries, extracts and converts the data to an industry standard for stakeholders to understand. The server also notifies operations staff if there is insufficient, corrupted, or incomplete data. Corrected data can then be provided to back fill and self correct. We installed alarms at each site to report failures and issues to operators. In addition to this we installed external internet based monitoring to notify operators if a site is offline.

Due to our previous experience, we anticipated the requirement for drinking water standards to be reported to the district health board. When this capability was requested it was easily added to the existing system.