Turning Vision Into Reality – A Utilities Journey In Using Remote Monitoring To Apply Advanced Analytics To Gain Knowledge. Phase 1 – The “Data” – Developing A Remote Monitoring Infrastructure To Support Rich Data

The Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati (MSDGC) needs to improve their 20 year old telemetry system for real time data and increased reliability. However, real time data without a strategy to utilize the data is of little value to an organization. Developing a strategy to make better business decisions with real time data is possible by utilizing Business Intelligence software to integrate the data with other business systems. Correlating the real time data with known failure modes can improve reliability and control cost.Once a strategy is laid out, the challenge quickly becomes how to get rich real time data from the remote facilities. This is an easy problem to solve if you have unlimited funds, but getting rich real time data from over a hundred pump stations cost effectively is challenging.MSD has successfully accepted the challenge and now have an installed the new telemetry system at several sites with exciting results.Our first phase was to identify a feasible communications solution from the current commercially available products and services to develop the infrastructure for solving the “Data” problem for over 100 remote facilities.