But there are two values that are often overlooked, that are key to developing effective strategies for proper non-revenue water (NRW) management, and prioritizing activities. And they are Technical Efficiency and Infrastructure Leakage Index.

Technical Efficiency represents a gross estimation of the percentage of the total water supplied to a sector over a specific period of time, that is not wasted as losses (apparent + physical). While the Infrastructure Leakage Index, proposed by the International Water Association, is a unit-less performance indicator of real (physical) water loss from the supply network.

Each reveals important information about the status and trends in your water network. The first one is relatively simple to ascertain, and the second one is more complex, but both are well within the capabilities of any utility.

By understanding these KPIs over time, with the right calculations, and the consistent visibility provided by the TaKaDu CEM, utilities can significantly improve prioritization activities in the field, better plan campaigns, better detect hidden leaks, and reduce overall water loss.

To help utilities optimize these valuable KPIs, we’ve written an in-depth article covering:

• The formula for calculating Technical Efficiency and Infrastructure Leakage Index
• Practical illustrations of how these calculations work – from real utility logs – including the insights revealed
• Benefits and limits of each KPI
• Concrete examples of activities that can be improved (and how) by regularly tracking your Technical Efficiency and Infrastructure Leakage Index

For all the details, including tips and a succinct walk-through of all the steps involved, we welcome you to download our latest article in full. It’s a great way to get more out of your CEM, but more importantly, your water network.

Water Scarcity and Stress

Water scarcity occurs when demand exceeds the available supply, leading to insufficient access to clean fresh water for essential purposes such as drinking, sanitation, and agriculture. Water stress measures the pressure on water resources in relation to demand, highlighting regions where resources are strained.

Climate Change’s Impact on Water Resources

Climate change plays a significant role in exacerbating water scarcity and stress. Increasing temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and more frequent extreme weather events disrupt hydrological cycles, affecting the availability and quality of water resources. As global temperatures continue to rise, the risk of droughts, floods, and water-related disasters intensifies.

Efforts to Address Water Scarcity

Countries worldwide are undertaking various measures to address water scarcity and stress both in water management strategies as well as infrastructure development. Governments and local authorities are implementing innovative water management strategies that emphasize conservation, efficiency, and responsible use of water resources. These strategies include promoting water-saving technologies, improving irrigation practices, and implementing water pricing mechanisms to encourage responsible consumption. Countries are investing in infrastructure development to enhance water storage and distribution systems. This includes constructing reservoirs, dams, and water treatment facilities to improve water supply and ensure its equitable distribution to communities.

TaKaDu: Empowering Utilities for Sustainable Water Management

TaKaDu’s CEM (Central Event Management) solution, helps utilities to address water scarcity and promote sustainable water management. The analytics platform enables real-time monitoring, detection of network inefficiencies, leakages, and abnormal consumption patterns. By promptly identifying and addressing asset failures such as leaks early in their evolution, TaKaDu assists utilities to achieve more-with-less by reducing water losses, optimize the water network operation, improve customer service and achieving sustainability goals.

Learn more about TaKaDu

Projected Future and Global Situation

Projections for 2040 suggest a troubling rise in water stress levels, with 44 countries expected to face “extremely high” or “high” water stress, affecting millions of people worldwide. This represents a significant challenge, as it underscores the urgent need for collective action to address water scarcity, mitigate climate change, and implement sustainable water management practices globally, ensuring the well-being of a growing percentage of the world’s population.

Through effective water management strategies, infrastructure development, and the adoption of innovative technologies like TaKaDu’s analytics platform, we can work towards mitigating water scarcity, reducing water stress levels, and achieving sustainable water management practices.

Collaborative efforts among governments, communities, and technology providers are crucial to ensuring water security for present and future generations. By prioritizing responsible water use, conservation, and sustainable practices, we can preserve this precious resource, protect ecosystems, and enhance the well-being of communities worldwide.

But despite its name, central event management is about far more than managing events; it’s also about improving the network and monitoring infrastructure.

Because the CEM system detects most events, such as leaks, pressure problems, degraded water quality and faulty sensors, early in their evolution, utilities can stop operating in ‘fire-fighting’ mode. Instead, they have the opportunity to fix problems before other indications are available.

But no matter how good the CEM system and event detection is, there will always be sections of the network that do not function well, rendering the utility blind to asset failure monitoring and events detection in those areas. These blind-spot sections are typically 10-20% of the network, or even more, so ignoring them means you are leaving money on the table.

To combat that, TaKaDu has defined three predictive management steps that are relatively simple to perform on a regular basis, and that yield high impact on your physical network and on your ability to pick up on meaningful events.

The three steps we recommend are:
• Identifying DMAs that need to be improved
• Identifying sensors that need to be improved
• Identifying missing or incorrectly configured sensors

Whether taking those steps is possible and what they involve will depend on the specific CEM solution you’re using, though with the TaKaDu CEM solution, they are quite easy.

To better understand what these steps are, their benefits and how to execute, read our in-depth article. In addition to practical pointers, we provide a succinct explanation of the added value of predictive network management, describing how you can, and should get more out of your CEM solution.

So, why is smart water management needed? And where is it going from here?

First steps toward smart water management

Utilities have long employed a variety of approaches to reduce water loss. Devices like simple listening sticks have been around for decades, as have billboards and radio advertisements urging consumers to call the water utility when they notice leaks or other problems. Periodic leak detection campaigns, in which teams scan different sections of the network on a preset schedule, is another common approach.

Those methods might have sufficed in the past, but today, many utilities understand that they need more advanced techniques that give them better visibility into what is happening in their underground network. In addition to reducing non-revenue water (NRW), they are looking to new technologies and processes to help them improve their operational efficiency and customer service.

Getting data is easy; getting insights from it is not

To this end, forward-thinking utilities are starting to establish district metered areas (DMA) and install digital water devices that generate data about conditions in the network, such as flow and pressure meters, fixed and mobile acoustic loggers, pressure transient sensors, water quality sensors, and pressure reducing valves (PRV).

Installing digital water devices is the first step in evolving toward smart water management. No utility should depend on just one type of technology, but rather each utility should combine multiple technologies according to the specific needs of the network. A utility in a densely built-up urban area (where fixing a leak could be challenging and expensive) might use methods for accurate leak detection and smaller DMAs, while a utility in a more rural area that covers a wider geographic area will get more value from pressure control and larger DMAs. Of course, environmental factors will make a huge difference too. Networks in hot and dry climates will likely need different approaches than those in colder and wetter regions.

The data generated by the various devices and systems can be processed and analyzed to extract insights about network conditions, leaks and other sources of NRW that can guide proactive repairs and maintenance. But the huge amount of data that is generated makes the ‘understanding’ process very complex – the more devices and systems, the more data, and the more difficult it is to extract insights. Therefore, advanced analytics tools and methods are needed to identify trends and generate visibility.

The missing piece: smart integration

While the various digital water systems typically offer some analytics, each one employs its own methodology tailored for the specific type of data. As a result, insights about different aspects of the network are siloed in different systems.

When there is one system for flow or customer usage data, another screen for acoustic logger data and yet another for satellite detection, it’s impossible to get a single comprehensive representation of the network status. It still takes multiple manual steps to detect leaks and other incidents, and to prioritize repair and maintenance activities – a process that is time-consuming and prone to error and inconsistencies. The siloed insights and convoluted processes also make it extremely difficult to dynamically re-prioritize activities as situations change. And, as more sensors and other devices are added, it becomes harder and harder to handle the huge and ever-increasing volumes of data generated across the network.

This brings us to the final crucial step utilities need to gain the effective visibility and control of their network that they are aiming for: integration. It’s vital to bring together the insights from the multiple different technologies and systems into a single platform where they can all be viewed together via one dashboard, one point of truth.

In short, integration of data as well as of the insights from multiple sources and systems is what turns water management into smart water management.

The value of smart water management

Integrating insights from the various systems and presenting them via a single portal or dashboard increases the reliability of the insights. When an alert generated by one system is complemented by insights from other systems, operators can be confident the alert is real, and set the appropriate priority.

With the ability to monitor all alerts through a single solution, control room personnel can work more effectively and efficiently. They can prioritize leak reduction activities better, improve incident response and confidently make dynamic operational decisions. The result: resource and financial savings, along with improved customer experience and interactions.

Smart water management can also play a significant role in creating a more sustainable future, helping utilities alleviate the effects of water scarcity and develop strategies to mitigate the effects of climate change. For example, as the water sector is the biggest consumer of electricity globally, driving down water loss can significantly reduce energy consumption – all the more vital wherever electricity is generated mostly by fossil fuels.

Smart water management at KUB

Looking ahead: More digital water technologies = more data

Despite being a traditionally conservative and slow-moving industry, the pace of technology innovation and adoption in the water industry is accelerating. Diverse new digital water technologies, telemetry and devices are already becoming available. These include automatic metering infrastructure (AMI), IoT water management technologies and devices, water quality sensors for turbidity or chlorine and others. It’s certain that more technologies will be added in the coming few years. As new types of sensors are introduced and the price of the new technologies come down, both the variety of sensors and the sheer numbers installed will rise rapidly, driving a parallel rise in the amount of data that needs to be analyzed and integrated prior to being used to generate insights for daily decision making.

We’ve seen it happen in other industries, from manufacturing to energy and power: as digital solutions become available, the use of IoT-enabled solutions expands. And the amount of data explodes. Today, utilities with digital water devices are struggling with a flood of data. Tomorrow it will be a ‘data tsunami’.

The next evolution: holistic smart water management

As the data tsunami gains strength, utilities will need to deepen the integration of multiple systems and all the data sources and take a more holistic approach to smart water management. Along with technically integrating data and information from disparate sources into a centralized, intelligent analytics platform, water utilities will need to be able to seamlessly integrate insights and create a simple visibility dashboard.

Los profesionales de las empresas de servicios de agua evalúan constantemente su operación y buscan formas de mejorar su desempeño, mediante la reducción del Agua No Facturada (NRW), aumentar el rendimiento de los recursos y mejorar el servicio al cliente. Eso es un hecho. Pero la pregunta es: ¿cómo hacerlo?

Si bien muchos reconocen que un CEM puede ofrecer todos esos beneficios y más, no están seguros de estar listos a nivel organizacional para implementar y maximizar esa solución. La incertidumbre les impide avanzar.

Los problemas reales involucrados en la evaluación de su disposición para el CEM

La realidad es que todas las soluciones empresariales vienen con requerimientos para asegurar una implementación y adopción exitosas. En el caso de un CEM para empresas de agua, estos incluyen liderazgo de la dirección superior, atención dedicada de un equipo multidisciplinario, financiamiento, una mente abierta para evaluar y modificar los procedimientos de trabajo (es decir, transformación), esfuerzos recurrentes de mantenimiento para conservar la red en buenas condiciones de funcionamiento, y la implementación del concepto del Sector Hidráulico (DMA). Algunos incluso cuestionan si su operación es lo suficientemente grande como para justificar un CEM.

Usando TaKaDu como ejemplo, desarrollaré cada uno de estos puntos y lo ayudaré a evaluar la preparación de su organización para implementar un CEM. Pero, ante todo, un spoiler: el liderazgo de la alta dirección es el factor más crucial. Tener la mente abierta a la transformación es el aspecto más desafiante; el tamaño y ubicación de la compañía no suponen una consideración.

Dónde empezar

Fundamentalmente, las empresas de servicios deben adoptar el concepto de DMA antes de implementar TaKaDu. Esto significa la división de la red en sectores hidráulicos (DMA) cerrados, la instalación de caudalímetros automáticos, la medición continua del agua entrante y saliente en los DMA, la recopilación de lecturas de medidores en un repositorio central, y la capacidad de extraer y compartir automáticamente esos datos con TaKaDu según programaciones predefinidas.

¿Debería esperar hasta que haya cubierto toda su red con DMAs y que todos los medidores estén en perfectas condiciones de funcionamiento antes de tomar en cuenta a TaKaDu? La respuesta es no. Una vez que tenga algunos DMA, ya podrá implementar TaKaDu.

A menudo el 10 o 20 % de los medidores no están en buenas condiciones de funcionamiento, incluso si dispone de una amplia cobertura de DMAs, y esto tampoco debería constituir un impedimento. Más aún, TaKaDu en realidad puede ayudar con este tipo de “huecos”, ya que, inmediatamente después de la puesta en servicio, le brindará una imagen completa del estado de todos los medidores, lo que le permitirá evaluar y reparar los medidores relevantes a su conveniencia.

Por lo tanto, si bien la cobertura completa de DMAs finalmente le brindará el mayor beneficio del sistema de monitoreo, esto puede suceder gradualmente y en paralelo a una puesta en servicio de TaKaDu en zonas con DMAs operativas.

La perspectiva de las personas

No importa cuán importante sea una tecnología, se necesitan personas para tener éxito. Para una implementación exitosa de TaKaDu, recomendamos un equipo de implementación multidisciplinario, compuesto por un mínimo de una persona con conocimiento sobre la topología de la red de agua y una persona de TI para extraer y compartir los datos necesarios con TaKaDu.

Para implementaciones en empresas de servicios más grandes, el equipo tiende a crecer e incluir miembros adicionales de cada disciplina, así como también un gerente de proyecto que coordine las actividades durante todo el proceso. Nuestra metodología de implementación e integración no invasiva de ocho semanas, simplifica y minimiza los esfuerzos necesarios para la integración.

Una vez que TaKaDu entra en funcionamiento, y considerando todas las observaciones accionables generadas 24/7 por el sistema, es posible que deba volver a evaluar sus procedimientos de trabajo existentes y modificarlos en consecuencia, ya que surgirán preguntas tales como quién asigna tareas a quién y cómo priorizarlas.

Por ejemplo, antes de implementar TaKaDu, pudo haber sido costumbre enviar equipos al terreno una vez al año para visitar y evaluar cada DMA siguiendo un programa predefinido. Sin embargo, con TaKaDu este flujo de trabajo cambia, y entonces las visitas son determinadas por la necesidad. Esto significa que ciertos usuarios del sistema asignan equipos en el terreno en función del caso puntual para administrar las fugas que detecta el sistema. Al hacerlo, las empresas de servicios se vuelven más eficientes y necesitan equipos más pequeños en el terreno para reparar la misma cantidad ,o incluso más, de fugas.

Si bien esta transformación mejora la condición y el rendimiento de la red de servicios, también afecta la forma en que operan los departamentos y las personas, y como resultado la transformación esperada rara vez sucede por sí sola. En la práctica, los gerentes senior lideran el proceso a través de su visión generalizada de la operación, impulsando la colaboración entre departamentos y alentando a los gerentes y empleados a modernizar los procedimientos obsoletos. En última instancia, esto hace que las empresas de servicios sean más proactivas en lugar de ser los “bomberos” que eran antes. A su vez, esto brinda muchos beneficios, incluyendo: la unión de silos, el aumento de la capacidad de la fuerza laboral para realizar más actividades, la reducción de los tiempos en las actividades de mantenimiento, y la aceleración del tiempo de respuesta a las solicitudes de los clientes.

Consideraciones presupuestarias

En la mayoría de los casos el valor de usar TaKaDu es sustancial, y las empresas de servicios reportan un ROI de alrededor de 5X-10X. En comparación con otros costos operativos la solución TaKaDu es accesible, pero aún requiere la aprobación de la alta gerencia.

Compromisos a largo plazo

Sin embargo, para aprovechar al máximo su inversión, deberá realizar un mantenimiento metódico de su red para mantenerla en buenas condiciones de funcionamiento.

Dado que el sistema destaca las áreas de la red que requieren atención adicional y de los activos que de vez en cuando no funcionan bien, necesitará capacidad y recursos suficientes para poder administrar los eventos que detecta, resolver los problemas, y reparar y reemplazar los medidores y otros activos como corresponda. Uno puede ver esto como una afirmación obvia, ya que parecería que todas las empresas de servicios efectúan sistemáticamente el mantenimiento de su red; sin embargo, la experiencia ha demostrado que no siempre es así.

Encontrar el momento adecuado

Como dijo una vez el director ejecutivo de uno de nuestros clientes más antiguos: “Nunca hay un momento ideal para comprar la solución TaKaDu. Nuestra tendencia natural es pensar que no estamos listos, y continuar perfeccionando el estado de los medidores, los sectores hidráulicos (DMA), los procesos y la colaboración entre departamentos. Con este enfoque, mejoramos gradualmente nuestro desempeño. Sin embargo, y no intencionalmente, perdemos o retrasamos una oportunidad mayor de beneficiarnos al adoptar una tecnología nueva y moderna”.

“Al contrario,”, continuó, “mi recomendación es adoptar el concepto de DMA [como se mencionó anteriormente], guiar a la gerencia de nivel medio para comenzar la implementación de TaKaDu, e iniciar el proceso de transformación hacia el final de la implementación”.

No puedo estar más de acuerdo con este enfoque.

Professionals in water utilities constantly assess their operation and look for ways to improve their performance – by reducing Non-Revenue Water (NRW), increasing resources throughput , and improving customer service. That’s a given. But the question is how?

While many recognize that a CEM can offer all those benefits and more, they’re not sure if they are ready on an organizational level to implement and maximize such a solution. The uncertainty holds them back from moving forward.

The real issues involved in assessing your readiness for CEM

The reality is, all enterprise solutions come with requirements to ensure successful deployment and adoption. In the case of a CEM for water utilities, these include leadership from top management, devoted attention of a multi-disciplinary team, funding, an open mind to assess and modify working procedures (i.e., transformation), recurring maintenance efforts to keep the network in good working condition, and implementation of the District Metered Area (DMA) concept. Some even question if their operation is big enough to warrant a CEM.

Using TaKaDu as an example, I’ll elaborate on each of these points and help you assess your organization’s readiness to deploy CEM. But first, a spoiler: top management leadership is the most crucial factor. Being open-minded to transformation is the most challenging aspect; the size of the utility and its location are not even a consideration.

Where to start

Fundamentally, utilities should adopt the DMAs concept before deploying TaKaDu. This means division of the network into closed supply zones (DMAs), installation of automatic flow meters, continuous measurement of the DMAs’ incoming and outgoing water, collection of meter readings in a central repository, and the ability to automatically extract and share that data with TaKaDu according to predefined schedules.

Should you wait until you have covered your entire network with DMAs and all meters are in perfect working condition before considering TaKaDu? The answer is no. Once you have a few DMAs, you can already deploy TaKaDu.

Often 10-20% of the meters aren’t in good working condition – even if you have extensive DMA coverage – and this shouldn’t be a barrier either. More so, TaKaDu can actually help with these kinds of “holes” as immediately after going live, it will give you a full picture of the state of all meters, enabling you to assess and fix the relevant meters at your convenience.

So while complete DMA coverage will ultimately give you the most benefit from the monitoring system, this can happen gradually and in parallel to a TaKaDu rollout in zones with operative DMAs.

The people perspective

No matter how great a technology is, it takes people to succeed. For a successful TaKaDu deployment, we recommend a multi-disciplinary deployment team, comprised of a minimum of one person with knowledge about the water network topology, and one person from IT to extract and share the required data with TaKaDu.

For deployments at larger utilities, the team tends to grow and include additional members from each discipline, as well as a project manager who coordinates activities throughout the process. Our eight-week deployment and non-invasive integration methodology simplifies and minimizes the efforts required for onboarding.

Once you go live, with all the actionable insights generated 24/7 by the system, you may need to re-assess your existing work procedures, and modify them accordingly – as questions like who assigns tasks to whom, and how to prioritize them arise.

For example, before deploying TaKaDu, it may have been customary to send Field teams out to visit and assess each DMA following a predefined schedule, once a year. With TaKaDu, however, this workflow changes, and visits are instead determined by need. This means certain system users assign field teams on a per-case basis to manage leaks that the system detects. In so doing, utilities become more efficient and need smaller field teams to fix the same number of, or even more leaks.

Although this transformation improves the utilities’ network condition and performance, it affects the way departments and individuals operate, and as a result the expected transformation rarely happens by itself. In practice, senior managers lead the process through their bird’s-eye view of the operation, by driving cross-departmental collaboration, and by encouraging managers and employees to modernize outdated procedures. This ultimately makes utilities more proactive as opposed to being the “fire fighters” they were before. In turn, this brings many benefits, including: bridging silos, increasing the workforce’s capacity to perform more activities, shortening turnaround for maintenance activities, and expediting response to customer requests.

Budgetary considerations

In most cases, the value from using TaKaDu is substantial, with utilities reporting ROI of around 5X-10X. Compared to other operational costs, the TaKaDu solution is affordable, but still requires senior management approval.

Long-term commitments

To get the most out of your investment, however, you will need to regularly maintain your network to keep it in good working condition.

Since the system highlights areas of the network that require extra attention and assets that are not working well from time-to-time, you will need sufficient capacity and resources to manage the events it detects, resolve the problems, and fix and replace meters and other assets accordingly. One may view this as stating the obvious, as it would seem that every utility maintains its network systematically, however, experience has shown this is not always the case.

Finding the perfect time

As CEO of one of our veteran customers once said: “There is never an ideal time to buy the TaKaDu solution. Our natural tendency is to think we are not ready, and continue perfecting the state of the meters, DMAs, processes, and collaboration between departments. With this approach we incrementally improve our performance. However, unintentionally, we miss or delay a bigger opportunity to benefit from adoption of a new and modern technology.”

Instead, he continued, “my recommendation is to adopt the DMAs concept [as mentioned above], guide mid-level management to start the deployment of TaKaDu, and launch the transformation process towards the end of the deployment.”

I cannot agree more with this approach.

Read in Spanish

Insights and experiences shared by:

• Cristian Jiménez, Operations Manager, Aguas Antofagasta, Chile
• Darren Cash, Customer Hub Manager, Sydney Water, Australia
• Francisco Iturriaga, Department Head, Operational Intelligence, Esval & Aquas del Valle, Valparaíso and Coquimbo, Chile
• Germán Ramos, Operations Manager, Sedapal, Peru
• Nick Goninan, Technical Officer Non-Revenue Water, Hunter Water, NSW, Australia
• Rhett Duncan, Executive Manager – Customer Delivery, Unitywater, Queensland, Australia

Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: Please tell us about your DMA strategy: How did you sectorize your network, what monitoring devices do you use, and how has it working out for you?

Rhett, Unitywater: We operate about 180 DMAs with around 2,000 to 4,000 properties in each DMA. We use the DMA to identify water leaks and help us narrow down the potential for water leaks. In recent years, we rolled out small tests of smart meters, 300 here, 500 there. Now we’re rolling out a digital neighborhood, with 10,000 smart meters across three DMAs. Within those DMAs, we now have flow meters, pressure meter monitoring of what’s coming in, digital meters, acoustic leak detection, and water quality sensors, so we understand that what is going on within those DMAs in almost real time.

This initiative is not about proving the technology, as we know it works. Rather, it’s now about testing it en masse, and critically to help us build a business case to go forward to roll it out across the other 176 DMAs in the organization. As of now, we’ve got about 8,000 of those smart meters in the ground. With acoustic leak detection, we’ve already identified leaks that would have run to about 160 million liters of water had they had gone unnoticed in our trunk water main system. In addition to building the business case, the current trial is also about testing how Unitywater deals with the volume of data. How do we respond? How do we react when these alerts come in?

Francisco, Esval & Aquas del Valle: We have over 7,000 km of potable water, over 50 wastewater treatment plants, over 80 potable water plants, and more than 900,000 customers. We have a hilly topography and our water production catchment is far from the distribution areas, so we need many pressure reducing valves – over 1000 – to maintain the pressure within the allowed ranges.

Our work to sectorize the network began in 2014, and we now have around 460 DMAs. We wanted to illuminate our physical infrastructure, so we started with a massive installation of sensors and controllers – monitoring sensors, new pressure sensors, flow sensors, level sensors. Every year we install new sensors. Thanks to that monitoring and control work plan, in 2018 and 2019 we saw we had a lot of information, a lot of sensors generating big data, so we wanted to take better advantage of the information. That’s why we decided to test tools such as TaKaDu. Now we have more than 8,000 sensors that are generating events and alarms in TaKaDu, approximately 100 events monthly.

Learn more about Cenral Event Management – Contact us

Nick, Hunter Water: Back in 2015-16, we were surveying approximately 20% of the network and the decision was made to progress DMAs across the network to reduce internal water loss, repair point source leaks, and to ramp up our active leak detection. Our goal was to reduce real losses by 2.4 gigalitres per year by 2024. This would involve increasing our DMA coverage from 25% to 100% and to monitor on TaKaDu. We wanted to have a more targeted active leak detection program, increase the rollout of pressure managed zones, and continue our consumer water conservation strategy. In 2021, we reached 45% DMA coverage. It’s encouraging to us that each year from 2015, we’ve progressively been reducing our leakage rate and we hope to continue that.

In terms of DMA size, we aim to keep it to under 5,000 properties. At the moment, we have a number of large DMAs, and we’re still kind of learning what the sweet spot is.

Germán, Sedapal: Our first sectorization projects in Lima started in 1994. The first thing we did was divide the whole city into a grid of supply sectors based on two basic criteria: an average of 5,000 connections and serving an area of around 25 km2. Of course, in reality, this varies a lot. We tried where possible to divide the sectors along major avenues that would allow us to install two parallel pipes, so each sector would have its own independent pipe. The sectorization also included implementing a SCADA system. Today we have around 400 sectors. The entire central area city is sectorized and has automatic remote controls through a SCADA. This has allowed us to reduce non-revenue water, which in the 1990s was around 48%, to the current level of around 23%. We also have subsectors. Before the sectorization, the city was divided into large pressure zones, which meant if there was a major leak, we would have to cut off water to large areas. Now we can cut it off only at the subsector level.

Now we are installing data loggers, especially in the central areas of the city, to be able to manage pressure. Data loggers with GPS gives us a remote view of how the pressure varies across the various secondary city networks.

Darren, Sydney Water: We serve over five million customers. About 25% of our network is divided into small DMAs that are also pressure-managed. We’ve found that around 5,000 properties per DMA is pretty much the sweet-spot size. Each of those DMAs has a pressure-reducing valving, a flow meter, and one or two pressure gauges within the zone. We set them up from 2007 to 2010, and we’ve got some pretty good data on them now. Pressure management has resulted in a 4% to 5% reduction in the number of breaks and leakage within each zone. But one of the key things that the DMAs allow us to do is really to get a better handle on the leakage as it’s happening, and to target investigations rather than just doing blind active-leak detection, which is the traditional approach. And so, we’re able to see leaks as they happen pretty much straight away and initiate an investigation. We’ve had a lot of success with that approach, and that’s probably the biggest benefit of having small DMAs.

Cristian, Aguas Antofagasta: Antofagasta is in the foothills of the coastal mountain range. The distance between the coast and the most distant pond is only 3-4 km, but the difference in altitude can be over 200 m. Therefore, sectorization is something that has accompanied us since the development of the network, you could say the network is born “sectorized”.

I think that nowadays we should be shrinking these sectors, and in an ideal world we should also be moving towards sectors that are measured, because when we have a measured network, we have a clear idea of where we have to focus our efforts to meet objectives.

Before we started using TaKaDu in 2011, we had around one sensor for every 6-7 km of network. Since then, we have tripled the number of sensors (and as a result we needed fewer analysts, of course).

Q: What are your plans for upcoming changes to your DMAs and your metering strategies?

Rhett, Unitywater: The expectation is we will continue to roll out digital meters into the future. Probably, we’ll never be done with it, because I think the technology will always advance at a pace that our investment program can’t keep up with. We turn over our meters roughly every 15 years, so within the next 10 to 15 years, we would envisage all of our meters being smart meters. As to whether that will be integrated meters or mechanical meters with a clip-on, technology advances will direct that as we go.

We’ve also tested sewage monitoring and we plan to start installing some smart assets into our sewer network. We’re largely a coastal utility so we do suffer from tidal inundation, we have a lot of groundwater, a lot of sand. Inflow and infiltration are particular challenges for us. Last year, we treated about 10% more water than we sold, which says we have reasonably significant infiltration and inflow challenges across our network. Establishing real-time sewer monitoring will allow us to manage that and help us identify where we need to replace sewers. It will help inform our relining programs and, obviously, having real time data on what is actually going through the sewer network will help inform our tray waste program.

Nick, Hunter Water: The next stages will involve segmenting the existing networking to further DMAs and using virtual DMAs. At the moment, we have 120 flow meters in the network that contribute to DMAs. And we anticipate we’ll need an additional 200 to get us to 100% DMA coverage.

As we increase our DMA coverage of the network, we will use Takadu to direct our active leak detection, rather than just sweeping through the network. We’re also trialing residential smart meters to include billing into Takadu.

Germán, Sedapal: I’m convinced that sectorization alone is important, but it is more important if there were a tool that manages the big data that it creates. The information that you can have about the sectors, pressures, flows is so great that doing it manually is quite tedious, and tools like Takadu that analyze historical information, big data, and generate trend leakage are important. That is why we at Sedapal believe that we must implement a big data analysis system to be able to complement the advanced sectorization that we already have.

Darren, Sydney Water: If we were designing a system from scratch, we’d aim for full coverage of DMAs across our network. But given some of our massive gravity systems, and the complexity with doing that, it’s too complex. We are starting to roll out digital meters, so there is an opportunity to incorporate pressure sensors into some of them. We’d have at least one pressure sensor within each isolation block of around 20 to 30 properties, which would give us a real ability to pinpoint where something may have happened.

A note from the TaKaDu team
It’s commonly said you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and you can’t measure what you don’t monitor. In line with that, district metered areas (DMAs) are fundamental to effective management of any water network. The insights shared above highlight that every utility approaches sectorization slightly differently and that DMA development is an ongoing process. For more insights and recommendations on how to approach sectorization – including a formula for calculating the ideal DMA size, see our in-depth article on DMA strategies.

About the From the Field series
Hearing from peers in other water utilities is one of the best ways to get new ideas and gain more understanding about issues and trends. Each From the Field article provides a platform for water professionals to share their thoughts on a particular topic.

This is the 4th article in the series. Read the previous articles:

• What Happens when you start bridging silos?
• Top Priorities 2022-2023
• How Utilities are Coping with Covid.

If you have ideas for other topics you would like to hear a range of views about, please let us know. And remember to check back here soon for the next article in the series.

Learn more about Cenral Event Management – Contact us

This article focuses on how three utilities are breaking down the traditional barriers between different teams and departments in their organization, and the benefits they are seeing from this.

Insights and experiences shared by:

• Darren Cash, Customer Hub Manager, Sydney Water, Australia
• Francisco Iturriaga, Department Head, Operational Intelligence, Esval & Aquas del Valle, Valparaíso and Coquimbo, Chile
• Rhett Duncan, Executive Manager – Customer Delivery, Unitywater, Queensland, Australia

Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: What steps are you taking to break down the silos in your utility? And what benefits are you seeing from those efforts?

Darren, Sydney Water: We’ve brought together a lot of functions that were previously siloed under different businesses. Many of them were siloed geographically as well. So, instead of having people spread out in eight different locations, with eight different line managers for the different functions, we have one team that is now all in one location, and under one reporting line.

That has been a key enabler to us building a central view around the customer. We’ve embedded that customer centricity into all our functions. Previously, the customer-centricity might have been there with our call center operators, but not necessarily with the other parts of the process that fit into my team. It’s been a big success, and it’s something that the individual team members really get a lot of satisfaction out of. They like being able to work together on solving a problem and on avoiding a problem for customers.

Rhett, Unitywater: We are very consciously working on the culture of our organization to make sure people closest to the action are empowered to make decisions. So, rather than a question coming up the management chain, going across into another division, and going back down to the person with the answer, we are empowering the people on the frontline to reach across to their peers on the frontline in other parts of the business, ask a question, make a decision, and move forward.

In the past couple of years, we’ve been actively bringing teams together from across the organization. We have a leadership forum where all the leaders in the organization meet twice a year, and in addition, we bring together branch managers and section leaders quarterly.

So, we’re working hard to connect people across the organization, and as a result we’re seeing the speed at which the organization can now work is accelerating very, very quickly.

Learn more about Cenral Event Management – Contact us

Francisco Iturriaga, Esval & Aquas del Valle: Visualization and data management was traditionally managed in silos, with no real interaction between the different platforms and different teams. TaKaDu finally allows us to be able to integrate the silos and merge the information to generate a better result.

A large number of our people are all working with TaKaDu, which is improving communication and collaboration. About a fifth of the company interacts with the TaKaDú platform, which, in our opinion, is an important number. There are also different teams and areas that operate the system for different purposes, for example, maintenance, field operation, planning, hydraulic modeling, the operational intelligence center which looks at water losses, repeated outages, and bursts. Finally, there are a series of cross-company areas that use the tool.

A note from the TaKaDu team
A central tenet of TaKaDu central event management (CEM) is that it becomes a single source of truth, and employees from multiple disciplines can use the information it provides to make decisions. As TaKaDu is a web application, everyone can easily access it to add their insight. At all stages in the management of events, employees use it to share information with peers or to hand over the responsibility to team members with more expertise. We’re inspired by how these utilities are successfully adjusting their people, processes and technology (PPT) and as a result are increasing their operational efficiency and delivering significantly better customer service.

This is the 3rd article in our From the Field series. Read the previous articles:

• Top Priorities 2022-2023
• How Utilities are Coping with Covid.

If you have ideas for other topics you would like to hear a range of views about, please let us know. And remember to check back here soon for the next article in the series.

Learn more about Cenral Event Management – Contact us

Now that TaKaDu Central Event Management (CEM) has been constantly monitoring utilities around the world for several years, we have amassed the necessary extensive data-based insight and experience for benchmarking utilities’ performances. As part of our work with customers, we regularly review their performance data against industry-wide benchmarks, helping them identify areas where they can potentially improve their network management

Some of the KPIs by which utilities can assess their event management performance are:

• Water Savings – The amount of water saved from all leak events detected by TaKaDu CEM and confirmed by the utility. High Water Savings typically correlate to higher scores in the other KPIs.
• Water Loss – Water Loss, closely related to Water Savings, measures the water loss from all the events that CEM detects and are confirmed as leaks by users. Interestingly, a high amount of Water Loss is usually an indication of missing or low-quality data.
• Data Quality and Availability Scores – These are two very strong indicators of how well utilities are monitoring asset failures. The higher the scores, the better. In areas of the network where the data arrives infrequently and with inadequate quality, utilities have limited capabilities to monitor these areas and detect asset failures such as leaks.
• Data Quality Trend – TaKaDu CEM gives utilities insights into issues that need to be fixed, enabling continuous improvement. In most cases, utilities significantly improve their data quality score over the first few years of using CEM. A Data Quality Trend that is not strongly improving or is unusually volatile suggests that the utility is not optimally maintaining its network.
• Response Time to Leaks General and Hidden – These KPIs show the average time lag between when TaKaDu CEM issues an alert that it detected a general or hidden leak, and the time when the event is marked in the system as fixed. Faster response times equate to reduced water loss. Over time, most utilities show significant improvement in both KPIs, indicating they have adopted methodologies and processes that improve and speed their decision-making.
• Response Time to Telemetry Faulty and Faulty Meters – How fast telemetry and meters issues are fixed has a direct impact on the quality and availability of data, which in turn impact the response time to leaks.
• Real Events Detection – This KPI shows the percentage of TaKaDu events alerts that are real (i.e., not false-positives that may be caused by higher consumption). High Data Availability and at least average Data Quality rates are essential to a high Real Events Detection rate.

The value of KPIs

For all those KPIs, and others, TaKaDu has developed industry benchmarks that allow utilities to compare their own performance to industry leaders. This helps them identify areas where their performance is weaker and enables them to set measurable goals for improvement.
We recently published an article that explains these KPIs in more detail, with real-world examples. In the article, we share our insights regarding the industry benchmarks that utilities should be aiming for.

Insights and experiences shared by:

• Darren Cash, Customer Hub Manager, Sydney Water, Australia
• Francisco Iturriaga, Department Head, Operational Intelligence, Esval & Aquas del Valle, Valparaíso and Coquimbo, Chile
• Nick Goninan, Technical Officer, Non-Revenue Water, Hunter Water, Australia
• Germán Ramos, Operations Manager, Sedapal, Peru
• Rhett Duncan, Executive Manager – Customer Delivery, Unitywater, Queensland, Australia

Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: What do you see as your overall top challenge or goal to address in the next one or two years, and why?

Darren, Sydney Water: Our main challenge at the moment is probably to improve our field mobility, and the optimization of our field resources. We’re still planning, scheduling, dispatching work to our field crews in a fairly manual fashion. But there’s a lot of smart automation built into the technology we implemented over the past few years, so there’s lots of opportunity to improve – to reduce repeat work, reduce travel times, increase the number of jobs we can complete per hour.
One of the drivers for this is efficiency. Travel in Sydney is very difficult; any travel between one location and another is almost guaranteed to take an hour. So, if we’re able to better optimize the use of field resources, and optimize routes, that would have a big effect.
The other driver is both employee and customer experience. We want to provide our field employees with everything they need to be able to respond to something for a customer, not just a line item on a work order. If they can see things like how many other interactions that customer had with us, then the customer doesn’t have to repeat information to our field crews. It’s a much better experience for our employees, and also for our customers.

Rhett, Unitywater: We’re an amalgamation of several council businesses where, in the early years, the capturing of records and information was somewhat ad-hoc. That’s changed over the past 10 years or so, but details on some of the older underground assets are largely unknown. There’s a lot of information in people’s heads. So, our challenge for the next few years is how to capture and systemize all that information.
Adding to that challenge, 25% of the field force are aged 55 or over, and we’ve got two employees who are 70. At the moment, their knowledge is largely transferred from head-to-head while we’re out on the job site. So, we’re working on ways to refresh programs to continue the transition of knowledge, and the building of skills, so we don’t have to rely on people remembering to share what they know about what’s under the ground.

Nick, Hunter Water: We’re aiming to get 100% of our network covered by DMAs by 2025. As we do that, one of our goals is to look at including billing data for TaKaDu, and we’re also looking at linking maintenance jobs with TaKaDu events.

Learn more about Cenral Event Management – Contact us

Q: What is your top priority for the next few years in terms of maintenance?

Germán, Sedapal: Having sectorized our network, we have a lot of information about the sectors, pressures, and flows, which is great; but dealing with it manually is quite tedious. I’m convinced that we would get more value from the sectorization by better leveraging the big data it creates. That’s why tools like TaKaDu that analyze historical information, big data, and generate leakage trend information are important. And, going forward we believe we must utilize TaKaDu even more for big data analysis, to complement the advanced sectorization that we already have.

Francisco Iturriaga, Esval & Aquas del Valle: Our flow sensors generate the most benefits, because we see continuity and leakage problems from those events. So, maintenance of our macro flow meters is an ongoing priority for us. We have already defined resources and processes to be able to prioritize the maintenance of these flow sensors.
Another important maintenance challenge is around our pressure sensors, which form the largest part of our equipment. Maintenance of that equipment has been more difficult, but mainly because of the communication rather than because of sensor failure itself. The first pressure sensors installed were 2G, which is now obsolete in many places, so that means we have to acquire new equipment, either 3G or 4G.
Also, we have rural areas where communication is very, very low. So, I would say that the main maintenance problems we have are associated with communication, and we have to work on making sure our teams have the right communication for the current reality.

A note from the TaKaDu team
It’s illuminating to see how challenges and priorities vary among different utilities, with issues varying from field mobility efficiency, customer experience improvement, to knowledge retention with an aging workforce, and more. Listening to customers, we understand that while they have seen improvements in some areas from using TaKaDu (for example reducing water loss), there are always other areas in which CEM can help utilities solve issues and improve performance.

Thank you to everyone who shared their experiences and perspectives.

This is the second article in our From the Field series. Read the previous article: How Utilities are Coping with Covid.

If you have ideas for other topics you would like to hear a range of views about, please let us know. And remember to check back here soon for the next article in the series.

Learn more about Cenral Event Management – Contact us