Ease Your Transition
With Local Water Done Well many councils are facing many changes and challenges in how they operate. The focus for many over the coming years being around people and processes, and how they can be settled into a new organisation. During this process it can be daunting to consider the workload, or more so, the unknown within the network and assets that you are bringing together. This is not something you have to do alone, Lutra have a team of water and wastewater experts who can support you through this transition and ongoing as your teams become operational.
Lutra's varied expertise includes process engineering, data management, remote operations support and training to name just a few that are relevant in your journey, but how exactly?
Process Engineering:
Asset Assessment- Many organisations will be gaining treatment assets including whole treatment plants, many of them will have been in service for some time, and their condition and performance may not be well understood. Lutra's engineers can visit your current sites and catalogue and assess your assets condition and even their current performance. They can use this to update PIDs and any O and M manuals too. Our experts will give a true unbiased assessment of your assets ensuring you have a proper understanding of their condition and predicted life span.
Operations- With the changes you may find you have gaps in your operational expertise, as operators move around and some may choose to retire. Luckily Lutra's team have years of operational experience, and can use this to help out at your plants, from assessing current plant performance, generating or updating SOPs, to helping out with the practical running of them. Having access to Lutra's team can help ease the pressure as you restructure your team, whilst also providing remote support to ensure no institutional knowledge is lost.
Training- You may find your new team doesn't have the training required to operate some of your assets, or you may lose some institutional knowledge due to staff movement. Lutra can help ensure your staff are fully trained for all your plants and processes. Lutra have a wealth of experience gained from producing the content for the National Diploma's in Water and Wastewater, producing tailored LTO digital training for treatment plants and giving classroom and practical training on subjects as diverse as SCADA usage to jar testing.
Masterplanning- “Fail to plan, plan to fail” as the old adage goes, and many of you will find yourself needing to generate new long-term plans or to merge them. Lutra have been involved in several large long term planning projects with councils in NZ, we can help assess your current treatment capacity with your predicted future needs and help you feed this into your masterplans for your plants and network.
Software (ID):
Lutra are not more than process engineers, they are also software developers, data analysts and customer support supplying Infrastructure Data (or ID for short). As many of you know ID is a complete management system for your water and wastewater data, from compliance to performance monitoring and optimisation.
How does ID relate to Local Water Done Well transitions? Well there are a couple of ways:
Change to ID- If you aren't already using ID to handle your data, now is the perfect time to switch to a better more fully featured platform. ID is not just a fancy excel spreadsheet, it is built from the ground up to manage water data and makes compliance reporting easy. ID is used by NZ's largest water suppliers such as Watercare and Wellington Water and is seen as the industry standard. Find out more about ID on the ID homepage.
Utilise ID with our Process Engineering Team- You may be unsure of just how well your treatment plant is really running and your team may be too busy with day-to-day running of your plants to really assess this performance. Lutra are unique in that we can offer to supercharge our software offering by combining it with our process engineering expertise. This can take the form of performance monitoring of your plant or specific process from one of our team. They will look at the performance and give a report and/or suggest process optimisation based on the data they are seeing. This can ensure your plant's are working efficiently and quickly flag any issues.
Upgrade to Advanced Process Modules- Perhaps your team just needs a faster and more detailed way to view process performance, well another way we combine our software and process engineering knowledge is in our pre-made Advanced Process Modules (APMs) these are focused performance dashboards and reports that are set up to monitor a specific process in detail. APMs are available for processes such as Activated Sludge, Chemical Usage, and Biofilm Processes. Find out more about APMs here.