What’s in Your Toolbox? Applying Information Technology to Reduce SSOs

San Antonio Water System (SAWS) has successfully integrated a variety of information technologies to assist in significantly reducing sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs) in its 5,300 mile wastewater collection system. Combining data from these technologies has provided essential decision support for operations improvement, proactive maintenance, identifying management issues, forecasting outcomes, and developing a billion dollar asset renewal plan. The results have cost-effectively resulted in a reduction of SSOs by more than 50% since 2010.SAWS information tools have proven highly effective for collecting, organizing, analyzing, maintaining, and accessing a wide variety of critical data from throughout the utility. This data includes asset, condition, capacity, risk, operations, financial, and project information, which is presented to management in formats that support optimum decision making. SAWS information tools and data combine to provide consistent answers to everyday questions, and perform analyses with multi-hundred million dollar impacts. The same information tools also generate auditable reports to the EPA on SAWS progress and Consent Decree compliance.Examples of SAWS effectiveness improvements resulting from integrating these information technologies and data include:OPERATIONSContinuous improvement of preventive cleaning frequenciesOptimized crew routing for preventive activitiesREMEDIATION PLANNINGPredicting inflow reduction from fixing system defectsEvaluating alternative solutions for remediating capacity and condition problemsProjecting total CD-related remediation costs from early condition assessment resultsBalancing asset criticality, budget constraints, and management resource availability in scheduling multiple years' capital projectsPROJECT MANAGEMENTTracking the current status of over 10,000 assets identified for remediationIdentifying projects in danger of missing their required completion datesSAWS is accomplishing these outcomes largely by integrating data and functionality from widely used off-the-shelf software packages. The resulting data-driven decisions enhance SAWS everyday operational effectiveness, and enable consideration of numerous alternatives to bring about a highly cost effective asset renewal plan.