Customer

The primary consumer of our water,  sewer and recycled water networks are the customers that require a range of services to support their activities. These range from  general household consumer to the industrial customer. Their requirements include turning on the taps and receiving good quality clean water at reasonable pressures, collection of sewer and where available recycled water to reduce their dependence on the precious potable water resource.

The Governments also play a critical role in the infrastructure development and the long term security of these water resources and also the health and well being of the consumer

In recent droughts the focus on water conservation and the need to respond quickly to interruptions in networks which add pressure to the  operational and maintenance workforce.

In contrast flooding can challenge the sewer infrastructure causing potential health and environmental issues.

These are challenges Maple & Associates focus heavily on and welcome the opportunity to develop appropriate and cost effective solutions to these challenges.

Operational Control Centre

Some of the key challenges facing many authorities is the development of a task oriented Operational Control Centre.  There are many models that meet the need of different operational entities, ranging from fully in house to completely outsourced. With experience in all ranges of models Maple & Associates is able to develop plans and processes that allow firstly an assessment of the company requirements and then develop an appropriate response model for that organisation and then develop an action plan to put this response model into place.

KPI and Regulatory Management

Throughout the industry there is a range of KPI’s that are required to meet the organisational needs. These KPI’s will include regulatory performance parameters which are required under legislation to be met, but increasingly the cost of meeting some of these KPI’s might put some doubt on their relevancy so Maple & Associates can assist in the economic development and impact of achieving those KPI’s.

Many of the KPI’s will be required for both benchmarking and health requirements but many others might be peripheral but still impact on how customers are being serviced and the regime of operational and maintenance to support those KPI’s.

The operational control centre can play a vital role in both monitoring and reporting these KPI’s

Water Quality Monitoring

One of the critical challenges of the water networks is the monitoring of the important health related parameters within the network. The costs of laboratory testing and the timeliness of that testing is an important consideration in the development of on line testing via the SCADA network. Although in its infancy in  the innovation cycle,  as this develops it will be critical tool for the ongoing improvements in water quality across networks and across countries.

As the development and use  of recycled water broadens, online monitoring will become an extremely important part of any supply network both as a checking mechanism and also as a long term historical information for consumers to assure recycled water meets all the health requirements.

Sewer Quality Monitoring

As with Water quality monitoring the sewer networks require even more variety of sampling and monitoring. In those areas where a there is a high density of consumers, monitoring some specific aspects of the sewer quality, whilst within some industrial and even commercial areas it is important to identify some key components of the trade waste system and be able to monitor these components on line and in real time.
The continuing treatment of much of the raw sewage to support recycled water developments means the critical characteristics of the sewer need to be monitored prior to the treatment process, so the treatment can be varied to support the variations with the sewage inputs.

Safety/Quality/Environment

Maple & Associates has a  group of professional technicians that are focussed on providing full ISO accreditation where required or just improving systems and processes that would lead to an eventual accreditation process.

In addition to the accreditation process the group is well versed in many of the specific safety elements that make up the sewer and water networks. These include specifically Confined Space Entry, Electrical Current Monitoring, Working at Heights and Identifying assets below ground using  Non Destructive Digging. These aspects would be included in all elements of the safety and quality review process.