GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms , a unit of GE Enterprise Solutions, announced that the City of Haverhill, Massachusetts, has chosen the company’s breakthrough Proficy Workflow to computerize the city’s Water and Wastewater Treatment Plants. The water treatment plant is a 5 to 12 million gallons per day (MGD) operation that serves approximately 52,000 households. The wastewater treatment plant treats approximately 10 MGD with peak wet weather flow exceeding 60 MGD.
The city purchased Proficy Workflow to computerize paper Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) documents including State-mandated Emergency Response Plan (ERP), Low Chlorine Residual, High Chlorine Residual, Low Fluoride Residual, High Fluoride Residual, High Clear Well, Intrusion, Clear Well Flush, Chemical Leak events, and the High Flow Management Plan for the wastewater treatment plant. All of these SOPs exist in a paper flow chart format, which makes them easily transportable into the Proficy Workflow solution.
“Although we had written SOPs, we had no cohesive system for following them or important corrective actions,” said John D’Aoust, Manager of Haverhill’s Water Treatment Plant. “Now, we can use Proficy Workflow to guide the operations staff through proper procedures and help with a newly-mandated Emergency Response Plan (ERP) for water facilities and high flow management plans for wastewater facilities. Having the responses to meet State requirements in an electronic system can show that we followed procedures correctly. With Proficy Workflow, we know we can achieve consistent operations of the staff, learn how long it takes to accomplish steps and run our operations faster.”
The city also had a recent situation where the plant lost power. According to D’Aoust, his operations staff could have saved hours getting back on line through Proficy Workflow.
Proficy Workflow enables an environment of information-rich, circumstance-based workflows that operators follow to understand what’s happening around them and how to react in a sequenced and procedural manner that is repeatable every single day, by every single operator. With a Work Process Management system, plant managers have the opportunity to improve quality, reduce operational costs and secure operations for a true sustainable advantage.
GE Fanuc recently announced Proficy Workflow for Water/Wastewater, which allows operators to better understand the information at hand – and take action, improving effectiveness by up to 15%. Additionally, Proficy Workflow can connect to many existing databases in water and wastewater treatment plants – both GE Fanuc and third party, using Proficy SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). This architecture connects to different databases and pulls information back into video, portal or HTML screens. The software prompts operators for manual data entry, as needed, and the validated data becomes part of the facility’s permanent databases.
“Sometimes having too much information is as bad as not having any information at all,” said Alan Hinchman, GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms’ Global Water Industry Manager. “In a water treatment plant, managers and operators need to filter through complex situations and sets of circumstances, managing the data from many sources and understanding what the next steps should be. Management can count on the best operators – but these operators can’t handle every situation, every day, every year. With Proficy Workflow, you can make every operator an expert.”