In today’s episode of the “Start-up of the Week,” International Finance will talk about Qatium, which is a cloud-based developer of digital water technology with offices in Valencia, Spain and a presence around the world. The company is known for operating an open and collaborative water management platform that helps hundreds of utilities around the world improve the efficiency of their water systems.
The venture is operating with the mission of making digital water management available to all utilities.
“We give operations & planning teams’ full visibility to run their networks effortlessly in an open, digital environment. In particular, Qatium supports rural or underserved utilities, often most impacted by climate change, by offering our core functionality for free,” the venture stated.
Dissatisfied with the lack of progress and modernisation of water utilities, Qatium was founded in 2019 to provide water managers with digital tools to transform their operations and planning, and with that, meet the challenges of climate change. The venture has dedicated itself to the task of preventing “Day Zero,” where water reserves run out completely.
The Waterloo Success Story
Qatium’s one of the biggest success stories has been its solution for the Canadian city of Waterloo, which had uniquely limited visibility into its water distribution network. In Waterloo, a regional authority owns and operates all supply and transmission infrastructure in the City’s boundaries, so the area didn’t traditionally have access to the network’s SCADA data or a hydraulic model. And even if they did, they didn’t have the in-house personnel trained to use it.
“The City owns and operates 430 km of water distribution mains, 2,509 fire hydrants, and 3,892 main valves serving 150,000 customers, including 48 hydrant data-logging devices. The data logging devices give Waterloo some insight into pressure, and leakage information, but managers and operators still wanted more actionable information about their network. They wanted to be able to test the outcome of operations before applying them in the real world, so they could make better decisions and ensure uninterrupted service for their customers. Waterloo needed a low-cost, easy-to-use solution that would give operators, supervisors, and lead hands working in the field a way to use their live data on a day-to-day basis, without having the complex technical knowledge usually required for hydraulic modelling and testing scenarios,” Qatium stated further.
Because of Qatium’s easy-to-use interface and straight-forward model-building capabilities, the Canadian city’s administration wanted to dive in and refine its water distribution model with live data, so operators and managers could start using its predictive modelling capabilities.
Connecting live data to Qatium’s model is simple and serves as a way to validate and refine the model’s quality on an ongoing basis. In Waterloo’s case, Qatium is using an API to interface and integrate the city’s live hydrant and SCADA data into their digital replica.
Waterloo operators can now test scenarios in Qatium using the same controls operators are used to using in the field. They can open and close valves and isolate pipes, just like one would during maintenance, and see which customers will be affected by the process and by how much.
The city is now looking forward to further improving its model with more data streams. They will be able to simulate and analyse fire flow capacity, unidirectional flushing, and water quality in the coming days. Step-by-step, it is leveraging Qatium’s water management platform to empower operators to make data-driven decisions in the field. Qatium has repeated similar episodes in the American towns of Indiana and Lakewood. When it comes to the start-up’s digital water management ecosystem, it has its own in-house elements like GIS Model Data Audit, Ace23 Water Quality Workshop, Fireflow Analysis, Control Rules Detection and Tank Pressure Analysis. Together they have formed the “Qatium Labs,” which is implementing the start-up’s digital water management-related solutions.
Knowing The Products
Qatium’s flagship product is its easy-to-use water management platform, which takes advantage of water utility software without resource barriers, apart from transforming network operations in a secure and open environment.
Its key features are Network Visualisations (A clear, actionable network view for confident decision-making), Easy Model Builder (the user can build a hydraulic model from GIS data only), Warnings for Anomalies (identifies network issues and fix them fast), Live Data Connection (the user can connect its water management model with AMI / SCADA data to determine any deviations), Scenarios & Simulations (the user can review scenarios or test the impact of decisions in a virtual environment) and Digital Water Assistant (the user can share workload and receive guidance from Q, the artificial co-worker).
Through Qatium’s help, water utilities, irrespective of their operational footprints, can run their networks independently. The start-up’s water management solutions are tailor-made for both large and small utility players.
They can operate networks autonomously, apart from checking network status and health anywhere through smartphone screens. This helps them to react quickly to network issues, thereby saving time and act proactively against alerts for tank-level, pressure and water quality anomalies. The utility players can even plan network changes independently add new supply points without engineering support, design their networks and test them in real-time, optimise network performances, and be proactive and test the impact of decisions in a virtual environment.
Utilities are using Qatium’s solutions for activities like water main shutdowns, tank management, flushing sequences, managing demand and fire flows, pressure rezoning and network surveying.
The start-up is also supporting relief and development work for communities in need. Its free solution underpins water infrastructure projects in areas impacted by conflict/climate crisis. It helps the stakeholders to build a digital replica of water systems with GIS alone, in troubled areas, apart from getting alerts related to water network issues, and test planning network changes virtually before physically implementing them.
Then when it comes to the smooth handover of the project to the local partners, Qatium is there to ensure fast onboarding with easy-to-use software and continued network monitoring. The stakeholders can prepare, again through the start-up’s assistance, their funding justification-related reports with detailed KPIs (key performance indicators) about network performance.
The Successful Greenville Experiment
After the implementation of Qatium’s water management platform, Audi Findley, Greenville Water Utility’s Superintendent, along with his team, can see which customers will experience water-pressure shortages during “what if” scenarios. The easy-to-use interface quickly gives the team the knowledge they need to plan ahead and provide proactive customer service to the community they serve, just like a big-city water utility can do—but at a fraction of the cost.
Greenville Water Utility serves 4920 customers, including several neighbouring communities outside of Greenville’s limits. The growing town’s water is split between two suppliers. Edwardsville Water Corporation supplies most of the town, and Floyds Knobs Water Company supplies a small area in the northeast of town. The water comes from wells drawing from a sand and gravel aquifer adjacent to the Ohio River.
Greenville Water Utility is a small team with only two full-time employees in the field, including Superintendent Audi. However, the forward-thinking team has always looked for innovative ways to work more efficiently and provide the best quality of water and service to the community of Greenville.
The town’s administration wanted to understand a simple scenario: What happens to a group of customers’ water pressure if they’re temporarily moved from one of the town’s water supplies to the other while a tank’s being repaired?
Like many small water utilities in the US, Greenville doesn’t have an in-house GIS technician or hydraulics engineer to call upon at a moment’s notice to pull up the town’s hydraulic model and run a quick scenario. That means understanding the impacts of even the most basic scenarios often requires reaching into tight budgets and hiring consultants to use complicated software only they’re fluent in. Audi was looking for a simple, hassle-free answer that he got after importing the town’s mapping and hydraulic data into Qatium.
“Audi was able to see the same results his consultant gave him within minutes and just a few clicks. Qatium showed that after switching a group of customers to the alternate water supply, the pressure for those customers would drop around 30 PSI. But instead of a spreadsheet with a bunch of junction numbers, Audi could view and interact with the results in a user-friendly model of Greenville’s water system, clicking on each junction to see how much the pressure will drop,” the start-up narrated further.
“Qatium’s easy-to-use interface is world’s away from what Audi has used in the past. He can easily isolate individual sections of the water system by turning valves and pumps on and off and see how Greenville’s water system reacts as a result. How do flows change? How do pressures change? Audi can easily test his questions in Qatium’s interface to help inform his daily decision-making,” it concluded.