Achieving Operational Excellence - WONDERWARE - #6

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When Carson City Public Works chose Wonderware SCADA software solutions to manage its water purification systems, it gained improvements in productivity, regulatory compliance and maintenance.

In addition to productivity gains, Carson City Public Works also benefits by obtaining vital infor­mation from the Wonderware software in real time, leading to better-informed and thus more intelligent decision-making. Carson City Public Works man­agers are so impressed with the Wonderware software that it's become their standard.

Says Dennis Maple, control systems supervisor for Water and Wastewater Management,"Basically, here at Carson City Public Works, we've adopted Wonderware as our standard platform for water and wastewater management. It's used to monitor our facility for production, water storage and also our treatment processes."

Maple has gradually increased use of the Wonderware software products from initially just the InTouch supervisory software, to a comprehensive SCADA software solution featuring a plant historian, analysis clients and increased remote management capabilities. "We now use Wonderware's InTouch human-machine interface (HMI), InSQL historian and ActiveFactory client access tools."

Deploying Wonderware software makes a differ­ence to the utility's bottom line. "The software is helping Carson City become more efficient by tak­ing care of tasks that used to be performed by peo­ple, be it transferring or compiling information. With the Wonderware software, these are now automatic functions," notes Maple.

For top-level managers such as Tom Hoffert, opera­tions manager for the Carson City Public Works Dept., the Wonderware SCADA solution saves signifi­cant funds by eliminating the need to hire new per­sonnel. "We have not had to increase our staff on the water management or the wastewater side because we

CARSON CITY, Nevada, sits in the midst of one of the most scenic and historic areas in the United States. From the center of the city, which was named for frontiersman Kit Carson, visitors are only a short dis­tance away from Lake Tahoe,Virginia City and Reno.

The city has been a self-governing municipality since 1972, with the Carson City Public Works Department managing all the water for the city and surrounding county.The Public Works mission is to be completely self-sufficient—acquiring, using and reusing 100 percent of the water for the areas it serves.

Since 1991, Carson City Public Works has been using a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software solution from Wonderware, to manage water purification and wastewater recycling. The biggest benefit that the utility has seen is an improvement in operational efficiency. This improve­ment relates directly to cost savings due to signifi­cantly increased productivity.

6 Achieving Operational Excellence