Seminole County

Background

Seminole County, Florida – For Seminole County Water District, high-quality drinking water along with reliable wastewater collection and treatment, is its highest priority in serving its more than 440,000 residents. Operating five water treatment plants, two wastewater facilities, and three reclaimed facilities, Seminole County has relied on AVEVA to successfully manage its water management facilities for more than 20 years.

The department realized in recent years that it needed to have a more mobile way of managing plant facilities and communicating among plant managers by making plant operations data more mobile so share in the field.

With the task of producing more than 45 million gallons of fresh drinking water each day, the management team looked to AVEVA for a comprehensive mobile solution that could easily integrate with is existing AVEVA applications.

AVEVA Insight offered a variety of features that would best meet the County’s requirements to enable plant managers and operators to view plant data on their mobile smartphone, handheld and tablet devices.

We were trying to figure out the best way to get information from the historian out to the field,” said Russell W. Carpenter. “Our field operators and managers wanted to see their own trends, their own data and we were having a hard time finding something they could use to do that. Then I found Insight.”

Access to Real-Time Data Critical in the Field

“In the past we’ve had to rely on keeping someone 24 hrs. a day on a SCADA desk, or waiting for alarms to come in, and people called or paged out to address an issue at one of our plants,” said Russell W. Carpenter.  “Now they are able to have all the data they need at their fingertips.  It just makes their job a lot easier.”

Insight enables Seminole County to view, analyze and collaborate around its facilities’ process or operational data, metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs) and reports from any device.

Capital costs can be eliminated with a hosted solution from AVEVA or data can be kept within the organization’s building with an on-premises installation.

Insight enables the navigation of data from AVEVA Historian, or any historian, and from any SQL database using rich graphical charts and an intuitive and native application experience. AVEVA Insight is comprised of the Insight application and Insight Mobile Apps.  The application supports today’s state-of-the-art mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone, iPad, Google Android, Microsoft Windows Phone 8 and Microsoft Windows 8.

Seminole County has used a variety of AVEVA applications for numerous tasks ranging from making chemical pump changes, to pressure changes at its water facilities.

Insight MyAlerts Improve Overall Monitoring of Plant Operations

The Insight “MyAlerts” feature enables Seminole County operators to receive personalized alert notifications based on configurable thresholds for Tag Reports.  County managers and operators are now notified proactively.  Some of the Insight features available include:

• Proactive PUSH notifications, based on configurable threshold
• Real-time alerting
• Ring or vibrate notifications (From the Settings/Notification Center)

“Insight makes it so easy to monitor our alarms and to dispatch them to proper staff,” said Russell W. Carpenter.  “With this product, one of my chief operators has setup his own custom alerts.  So let’s say he’s at home sitting on the couch watching a football game and he gets an alert.  He’ll call the guys that are supposed to be taking care of that plant and let them know ‘hey your chlorine residuals are dropping.’”

With Insight, Seminole County can see the alerts before the actual alarm occurs.

“The best part about the alerts, is that we get to the problem before it becomes an issue, and the residents of Seminole county never see a problem,” said Russell W. Carpenter.

Reduced Costs and Improved Decision Making with Mobile Connectivity

Insight enables companies to reduce costs and improve productivity while making faster and better decisions by reviewing, analyzing and collaborating around a process or company data on mobile devices.

Smart phone applications and cloud computing drive the AVEVA mobile reporting solution.  With the prevalence of smart phone and other mobile technologies, AVEVA Insight phone app leverages this technology so plant data is always available on a cell phone, and in a form that is easy to view and manipulate.

Many of today’s top companies are using cloud computing to provide their workers with important company information in a highly cost effective and secure manner. AVEVA Insight provides the option of leveraging this hosted model to provide critical plant performance data at the lowest possible cost in less than one day, or the option of an on-premises deployment for maximum control and security.

AVEVA seems to have the pulse of the world in hand because they made it so you can flip to your watch, flip to your phone and see what’s going on,” said Russell W. Carpenter.