GE Digital (GE) (General Electric) Case Studies The City of Haverhill Water and Wastewater Division: Meeting critical needs and maintaining high quality
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The City of Haverhill Water and Wastewater Division: Meeting critical needs and maintaining high quality

GE Digital (GE) (General Electric)
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Utilities
Maintenance
Quality Assurance
Water Utility Management
Remote Asset Management
System Integration
The city of Haverhill, Massachusetts, operates both Water and Wastewater Divisions, providing drinking water to 58,000 residents and businesses, and producing two billion gallons of water on average each year. The facilities are 32-years-old, however, the control strategies they have in place today have put them well ahead of other facilities of similar size and operation. 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 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.
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The city of Haverhill, Massachusetts, operates both Water and Wastewater Divisions. The city’s Water Division provides drinking water to 58,000 Haverhill residents and businesses, and produces two billion gallons of water on average each year. The plant itself is manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to ensure the highest quality water is delivered each day to the city’s residents. Water quality is constantly monitored to make sure that it meets both state and federal drinking water quality standards at all times. 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.
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John D’Aoust, Plant Manager for the city of Haverhill’s Water Division, began many years ago by teaming with GE Digital 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 GE Digital's iFIX. It quickly became a real asset in maintaining water quality. Next, the Haverhill team added GE Digital's Workflow, a software platform for measuring and managing the efficiency of plant operations. 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. Allowing them to be untethered from the facility, but still access GE Digital’s software to maintain control of operations from any location.
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The move from a manually-intensive operation to a much more efficient software-based mobile operation has afforded the plant with much more flexibility.
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.
The team started using advanced analytics to model data for high flow situations—such as potential threats brought about by severe weather.
The upside of moving from three laptops to an iPad is that there’s only one machine to maintain, and the price per iPad is considerably less than having to purchase multiple laptops.
There’s a time savings, and it lowers the complexity of our system.
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