FAQs

The fundamental requirements for using CEM are division of the water network to DMAs (District Metered Areas) and automatic collection of the flow data of each DMA. For additional information, we recommend reading our article “Are We Ready for a CEM solution?”.

In addition to providing unique asset failure detection capabilities, TaKaDu CEM can easily host information from other solutions in a unified platform. This means that when analyzing events, your operators can utilize the additional insight provided by other solutions, with no need to juggle between multiple solutions. For additional information, we recommend reading our article “The path forward: smarter, data-rich water management”.

Our CEM solution is strictly a cloud-based solution and as such we offer our customers multiple benefits, including lower cybersecurity risks, simplified integration with other solutions, quicker onboarding and rollouts, and lower cost of ownership. Additionally, because everyone uses the same solution version, new enhancements are rolled out very quickly, bringing new value to our customers.

Certainly! With TaKaDu, there are no language limitations at all. We have already translated our CEM solution to many different languages, all immediately available to you. If your preferred languages have not yet been applied, we will perform the translation during our proven and rapid deployment process, to maximize ease of use for your staff.

The value of CEM is driven from both prevention of water loss and reduction of operational costs. We explain how to calculate the value through our article “The Value of CEM – Looking Beyond the Numbers”. In addition, you are welcome to schedule a meeting with our team and they will assist you with calculating your expected value from CEM.

You will start seeing benefits from using CEM immediately after going live. The immediate benefits are visibility about meters that are not working well and areas of the water network that are not closed supply zones. The next stage of benefits is related to more advanced incidents that the system detects, such as water loss, high/low pressure, water quality, pressure reduced values, water breach between zones, and others. As a result of using the system, you will have an opportunity to improve your working processes and communication between employees, further increasing the benefits to you. You can find an example of that in this case study: “EPM improves leak detection, operational efficiency and long-term planning with TaKaDu”.

The required number of operators depends on the size of your utility, whether you divide your operators into tiers, and whether they work in shifts or only during standard business hours. For example, experience shows that a utility with a water network size of 2,500 km that works only during normal business hours needs a single operator who uses the system daily for 1-2 hours. We recommend assigning employees from the core of the operation who have knowledge about the water network. Since CEM introduces new capabilities, as utilities progress through the adoption phases, they tend to go through some level of transformation of the way they work. With that in mind, we recommend nominating an executive manager to champion this journey. For more information, we suggest reading our article “Managing Change – A Vital Ingredient to CEM Success”.

There is no need to wait until you have covered your entire water network with DMAs. As soon as you have planned your DMAs project and started the work, it is a good time to start gradually deploying CEM. From time to time, following the completion of a batch of DMAs, they can be defined in the system and it will begin monitoring those DMAs, expanding the monitoring as your DMA coverage grows. With this approach, the system will assess the efficiency of every new DMA shortly after its creation by validating that it is indeed a closed supply zone and that all meters are working properly. This significantly boosts DMA performance; hence asset failures are detected sooner rather than later. For additional information, we suggest reading our article “Are We Ready for a CEM solution?”.

For more than ten years in fifteen different countries, we have applied a proven CEM deployment methodology that takes eight weeks from kickoff to go-live. Using a cloud-based solution with an easy, yet safe and comprehensive, integration process, means the system is fully functionable immediately after going live, enabling monitoring of the water network and detection of costly asset failures. For additional information about what is needed for deployment, read here.

By examining the DMAs of 15 water utilities around the world and looking closely at data from more than 1000 DMAs of different shapes and sizes, we concluded that the most effective DMA size for finding leaks is between 500 and 2000 connections. Through this review, we discovered that there is an empirical formula to assess the optimal DMA size for detecting the smallest possible leaks. For additional information, we suggest reading our article “Let’s Talk about DMA Size”.

SCADA and CEM are complementary systems required in any smart water network. SCADA systems provide rich data, enable monitoring and control of remote assets in real time, and in some cases provide simple alerts (for example if the flow values exceed certain thresholds). As TaKaDu offers advanced data analytics, with a decision support process for managing events, the asset failure events the system detect are most of the time within the normal operation range of the SCADA. This means that TaKaDu can raise an asset failure event (such as a leak) while the gauges in SCADA will not show anything unusual. Oftentimes after noticing the event in TaKaDu, users drilldown the data in SCADA with an attempt to search for additional hints about the failures TaKaDu detected. Utilities that store their network meter readings data in SCADA send to the CEM of TaKaDu that data through integration in predefined schedules (for example every hour). Introducing CEM strengthens the position of SCADA as it now has another role – being the source of the ongoing data CEM needs to function. The CEM leverages on the SCADA data and does not affect the SCADA itself leaving it walled off and secure.

For many utilities, the volume of repairs often surpasses the capacity of their field teams. Therefore, effective repair prioritization becomes crucial in managing time and resources efficiently. CEM offers a range of options to reflect the utilities’ priorities and provides the flexibility to switch between policies.

The system excels at sorting events based on various criteria, including detection/start time, cost, location, magnitude, and more. Additionally, it empowers users to filter events based on attributes such as status, type, location, time, and others.

Thanks to the continuous 24/7 detection and update of events, the system frequently reorganizes and re-prioritizes them, ensuring that the most critical tasks receive proper attention virtually every hour.”

To detect water loss incidents, utilities should segment their water network into closed supply zones and monitor the incoming and outgoing water flows for each zone. Optionally, they can also use AMI (residential digital meters) data to supplement the supply information for each zone, which measures the consumption within that zone. This additional consumption data aids in analyzing water loss events identified by CEM. When both the supply and consumption increase simultaneously and by the same magnitude, the system automatically reclassifies the event from a “Leak” to “Usage”. However, it’s important to note that AMIs are not essential for CEM to function and detect leaks.