Improving Operational Productivity
Client:
- City of Charles Sturt
Date:
Category:
- gHost, Case Study
The City of Charles Sturt Council took on the challenge of becoming their own water retailer but did not possess a software package or system to manage its data like larger commercial water retailers. With water retail not being the core business of Council, it was hard to advocate for the importance of data management and explain the shortfalls of the SCADA platform we were operating. Coming from a background of large water retailers, I understood the value in a data historian for internal and external regulatory compliance but could not justify the cost benefit of owning our own data management system.
The implementation of GTS Group’s gHost platform began a series of process transformations that saw the City of Charles Sturt Council create a business platform providing cloud-based dashboards, analytics, and automated regulatory and internal reporting. We managed to reduce the hours spent on creating and managing complex spreadsheets that were the glue to managing the SCADA data, water quality laboratory data and other fragmented data collections. With the help of gHost, we can quickly access regulatory report values, providing information to other parts of the business that was previously locked away, allowing us to get back into the field to do our work.
Data management used to be a chore, taking up to 16 hours per month, but with the use of the gHost platform I was able to reduce this to 2 hours per month, and used the saved time to create my own dashboards to show management and stakeholders how the system was performing in real time without the need to recreate the data in graphs. View-only access can be granted to the key stakeholders who were able to run their own reports and download data at a press of a button.
Through this type of solution, we not only saved significant time but could also start to make clearer decisions about what the data was telling us. We could analyse asset performance, make proactive decisions on maintenance and validate the future budgetary commitments with real-time evidence-based data.
Data management used to be a chore, taking up to 16 hours per month, but with the use of the gHost platform I was able to reduce this to 2 hours per month
The City of Charles Sturt Council took on the challenge of becoming their own water retailer but did not possess a software package or system to manage its data like larger commercial water retailers. With water retail not being the core business of Council, it was hard to advocate for the importance of data management and explain the shortfalls of the SCADA platform we were operating. Coming from a background of large water retailers, I understood the value in a data historian for internal and external regulatory compliance but could not justify the cost benefit of owning our own data management system.
The implementation of GTS Group’s gHost platform began a series of process transformations that saw the City of Charles Sturt Council create a business platform providing cloud-based dashboards, analytics, and automated regulatory and internal reporting. We managed to reduce the hours spent on creating and managing complex spreadsheets that were the glue to managing the SCADA data, water quality laboratory data and other fragmented data collections. With the help of gHost, we can quickly access regulatory report values, providing information to other parts of the business that was previously locked away, allowing us to get back into the field to do our work.
Data management used to be a chore, taking up to 16 hours per month, but with the use of the gHost platform I was able to reduce this to 2 hours per month, and used the saved time to create my own dashboards to show management and stakeholders how the system was performing in real time without the need to recreate the data in graphs. View-only access can be granted to the key stakeholders who were able to run their own reports and download data at a press of a button.
Data management used to be a chore, taking up to 16 hours per month, but with the use of the gHost platform I was able to reduce this to 2 hours per month
Through this type of solution, we not only saved significant time but could also start to make clearer decisions about what the data was telling us. We could analyse asset performance, make proactive decisions on maintenance and validate the future budgetary commitments with real-time evidence-based data.
Shannon Watkins
Former Coordinator of Recycled Water at the City of Charles Sturt
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