Beyond the Pilot: Accelerating Adoption of Real-Time Water Quality Intelligence to Transform Water Quality Operations
How might we define routes to implementation and identify potential barriers to adoption for near real-time drinking water analytics like Treatment2Tap? Could Ofwat’s Water Implementation Fund support adoption efforts for companies who could benefit?
This dash will focus on the Northumbrian Water-led Treatment2Tap project, in partnership with Siemens, which has developed a real-world validated Water Quality Analytics as a Service (WQAaaS) model and the lessons learned through its development and iteration. We invite water sector collaborators to explore:
- The impact against operational and regulatory priorities enabled by near real-time drinking water quality analytics, with a case study from Northumbrian Water’s Treatment2Tap deployment.
- How such a solution could translate to different water companies, considering differences in routes to adoption, integration with other monitoring initiatives across water and wastewater, and potential barriers (practical, organisational and commercial), using Northumbrian’s lessons learned as a starting point.
- How might we test replicability and develop outline adoption blueprints for different water company contexts.
- Potential partnerships on an Ofwat Water Innovation Implementation fund bid to de-risk adoption to business-as-usual for Treatment2Tap across the sector.
The day would specifically explore how the Treatment2Tap blueprint — including integrated sensor networks, analytics, operational workflows and proactive water quality management use cases — could be scaled and adapted across multiple water company environments.
This session is designed primarily for water leads and strategic delivery leads, across the water sector, to learn about our efforts in near real-time drinking water analytics and potential applicability.
Participants from other areas of the water sector, or sectors for whom real-time monitoring is of interest, are also welcome to attend.
By the end of the workshop, participants will have:
- Benefitted from lessons learned in developing and implementing near real-time water quality monitoring initiative.
Head of Water Quality Compliance for Northumbrian Water, Alan Brown, will take us through our journey to date, pivots and lessons learned, and provide time for Q&A with participants. - Developed a shared understanding of the implementation opportunity.
Including operational, customer, environmental and regulatory drivers for adoption of proactive water quality analytics. - Identified key barriers to adoption and scale-up for near real-time water quality analytics, with lessons learned shared by Northumbrian Water.
Including technical integration, business case confidence, operational ownership, procurement, cybersecurity, data governance and organisational change. - Tested the replicability of the solution across different water company contexts.
Including differing network characteristics, digital maturity, operational models and investment priorities. - Established appetite and next steps for a collaborative funding bid to the Ofwat Water Innovation Implementation Programme.
Including identification of potential Fast Follower organisations, implementation pathways, governance arrangements and immediate actions. - Explored viable implementation blueprints.
Including phased deployment, “Water Quality Analytics as a Service”, regional scaling approaches and support requirements for interested Fast Followers.
Treatment2Tap is an Ofwat-funded innovation project led by Northumbrian Water that explored how near real-time water quality monitoring and analytics can improve operational decision-making across drinking water distribution networks.
The project focused on enabling proactive management of water quality risks by integrating remote sensing, hydraulic data and advanced analytics into operational workflows.
Treatment2Tap aims to create a cohesive end-to-end solution — from sensors through to actionable operational insight — that directly supports high-priority operational and regulatory challenges faced by water companies.
The key objectives of the Ofwat funded Treatment2Tap project were to:
- Determine the most effective delivery model for large-scale water quality sensor networks and analytics;
- Develop analytics and operational insight that could integrate into real-time operational systems;
- Validate how proactive water quality management could be enabled using near real-time data and analytics;
- Build an evidence-based business case to support wider adoption and scaling across the UK water sector.
A core principle of the project was ensuring that the solution addressed multiple operational business needs simultaneously, helping break down siloed approaches to data collection and decision-making.
What the Solution Does
Treatment2Tap combines water quality monitoring, hydraulic data and analytics software to provide operators with near real-time visibility of network conditions and emerging risks.
It enables:
- continuous monitoring of water quality conditions,
- identification of hydraulic and water quality interactions,
- automated detection of abnormal conditions,
- predictive and proactive operational interventions,
- and improved operational understanding of water movement and behaviour across the network.
It does this through collecting and analysing data including:
- chlorine,
- turbidity,
- conductivity,
- pressure,
- temperature,
- DMA flow and pressure,
- service reservoir flow and levels,
- and sampled laboratory water quality data.
This is used to deliver insights to inform multiple areas of delivery, including:
- Optimising Service Reservoir tank cleaning and management
- Understanding Water Age in the Network
- Knowing the Water Age and Mixing in Service Reservoir Tanks
- Real-time notification of threshold breaches
- Improving investigation and root cause analysis of water quality events
- Understanding Material Transport in trunk mains and DMAs
