The City of Haverhill Improves Water and Wastewater Treatment Monitoring with Velotic’s iFIX

The City of Haverhill’s water quality is constantly monitored to make sure that it meets both state and federal drinking water quality standards at all times. Its water treatment processes include conventional surface water treatments such as coagulation, flocculation, sedimentation, filtration, disinfection, and pumping.

The city’s Wastewater Division maintains the wastewater treatment plant, which provides both primary and secondary treatment for the city’s wastewater. Within the Wastewater Division there are two groups—one monitoring wastewater collection and the other overseeing wastewater treatment, which includes bringing water and routing wastewater into various facilities from multiple points across the city.

As part of its duty to safeguard the city’s water supply, the Water Division is also responsible for monitoring water maintenance and water treatment, which includes protecting water resources. The city of Haverhill is currently supplied with water from Kenoza Lake, Millvale Reservoir, Round Pond, and Crystal Lake. The city needed a solution to better monitor its water treatment and maintain high-quality water levels.

John D’Aoust, Plant Manager for Haverhill’s Water Division, has been with the city for 18 years, and has been leading the charge to harness the power of the Industrial Internet. He began many years ago by teaming with Velotic to automate many of the processes that his team had manually documented in order to follow standard operating procedures (SOPs), including state-mandated emergency response plans (ERPs).

D’Aoust’s first step was to implement Velotic's iFIX, which quickly became a critical component in maintaining water quality. Next, the Haverhill team added Velotic's Workflow, a software platform for measuring and managing the efficiency of plant operations. It was an immense performance improvement over their documented processes.

Moving to a computerized process environment allowed D’Aoust and his team to have a cohesive system to follow procedures and respond to events in a consistent and sequenced manner. He took his connected environment even further and purchased Dell Latitude laptops for his on-call operators. This allowed them to be untethered from the facility, but still have access to Velotic’s software to maintain control of operations from any location. The on-call staff are the first responders for after-hour issues—maintaining pumps, monitoring chemical levels in the treatment plant, and even keeping a watchful eye on the plant itself as the post-911 era raised awareness for new safety concerns.

"With [Velotic’s] iFIX you can dial in the plant—get it set up and you don’t have to watch it as closely. It was all manually controlled before—all hardware based, and it took a lot of attention by the team to maintain."

Plant Manager, Haverhill Water Division

The laptops were equipped with Velotic's software and cellular dongles to access water facility operations. Each laptop had to be maintained and manually updated. The benefits of being remote and still being able to access iFIX were clearly visible, so much so that D’Aoust put Velotic’s mobile app to work and swapped out his pool of laptops for a single Apple iPad connected over wireless LTE. The plant’s team is alerted to any issue through a series of alarms that have been established, and they can use related products, such as troubleshooter programs to conduct flow chart decision-making for their wastewater operations.

One of the unanticipated benefits of Velotic’s solutions was the ability to capture and transfer knowledge easily between senior members of this staff and new hires.

"One of the biggest project benefits of putting the data model together has been capturing our knowledge base. We have people who have been here since the plant started more than 30 years ago, and when they retire, they take that experience with them. So, when new operators come in, they are able to know how the system works—to be able to adjust the treatment process for swings without impacting quality."

Wastewater Facility Manager, Haverville Wastewater Division

The move from a manually-intensive operation to a much more efficient software-based mobile operation has afforded the plant with much more flexibility and resulted in cost savings. The team is able to see everything that’s happening at the plant from a remote location and be alerted to changes in the water operations without a strain on human capital. Just recently, the team started using advanced analytics to model data for high flow situations—such as potential threats brought about by severe weather.

Using Velotic’s Troubleshooter, a powerful analytical tool that utilizes leading-edge techniques to extract knowledge from historical processes and plant data, the team is able get a real sense of how the plant will perform under certain conditions. For example, if the plant exceeded X-number of gallons a day, what is the likely result? Previously, the team had to refer back to historical data that was fixed and not fluid. Information was logged into an Excel spreadsheet—it was a very manual process with no modeling capability. Now they have five key performance indicators to monitor operational performance much more effectively.