Meeting Water Industry Challenges with Innovation

Smart Water Solution Expert Interview

Nicole Kaiser is a Senior Utility Solutions Manager at Badger Meter, where she supports the Sales team across the United States to help customers understand the company’s full portfolio. In this Q&A, Kaiser introduces BlueEdge™ and its benefits.

Why is innovation so important to Badger?

One of the things I really love about Badger Meter is that we are always listening and gathering feedback from our customers, partners, and industry collaborators to understand current and future pain points. We try to understand what solutions will bring the most value and make the biggest difference when it comes to addressing these challenges.

Badger Meter has over a century of experience in the flow measurement space, and we are building out a more diverse solution set today—encompassing pressure, leak detection, remote telemetry and water quality monitoring tools—to equip the industry to meet these challenges head-on.

Utilities need better tools to collect and action data when it comes to water system management. Badger Meter realizes that there is exponential value in creating opportunities to enhance system visibility and each organization is unique in what they need and where they are in their journey. It is not a one-size-fits-all approach, so it is important for us to offer scalable, customizable solutions to bring the most value to our industry. BlueEdge is how we organize this diverse, expansive set of solutions across consistent themes.

These four themes are the Measurement & Communication tools that allow us to collect the data; the Connectivity & Communication of data to the customer; the software and analytical tools that turns data into Insights & Action; and the Collaboration & Support we provide to ensure each customer is successful in their adoption of Badger Meter solutions. By striving for reliability, quality and consistency across these four themes, we have the power to transform the way our customers do business. It is an exciting time to be a solution provider in our industry.

Utilities are often strapped for resources, trying to do as much as they can with as little as possible. How are smart water solutions from Badger Meter helping utilities achieve this goal?

BlueEdge, and our complete solution portfolio, enable data-driven decisions. By delivering a better understanding of what's going on in their system, we’re helping our customers make better use of resources and optimize their operations.

Ultimately, that ends up driving cost savings. For example, if you can optimize your treatment process, or your flushing program, with accurate, near real-time or real-time data, you can save money on chemicals, energy, and labor. You're going to see some immediate benefits.

Data is powerful. With data, utilities can prioritize their capital expenditures and identify the most efficient way to operate their assets. Think about something as simple as not having to replace a large section of pipe because you are able to identify a leak before it becomes a catastrophic failure. These types of proactive monitoring activities will ultimately reduce costs and increase efficiencies for our customers. We see these types of efficiencies as a major benefit when utilities upgrade their metering programs and transition from manual reads to drive-by AMR, for instance.

Today, we are the industry leader in cellular AMI, offering customers the ability to access 15-minute interval consumption data without ever visiting a meter. This changes the landscape of how resources are allocated, how customer support is delivered, and how quickly a water system can identify issues in its system. There are so many ways that the evolution of data collection in our industry is helping water systems be more proactive, resilient and protective of their customers and the environment. I’m very proud to be part of that evolution as we bring BlueEdge solutions to market.

As we shift to a more preventative, proactive, forward-looking paradigm in water system management, the benefits are infinite.

How does BlueEdge deliver tangible benefits to your utility customers?

What's exciting about BlueEdge is that we touch every aspect of water resource management and offer solutions across the entire water cycle. From water supply shortages to water quality concerns and asset management decisions, BlueEdge solutions are positioned to help our industry address these issues and many more.

By collecting system data, leveraging advanced analytics to understand it, and then providing platforms for customers to share and action that data, we are observing immediate operational benefits. For example, we can help a customer understand source water characteristics so they can adjust their treatment process or we can monitor the edges of a distribution network where historically there was no visibility. Now, these water systems are able to react to changes faster than ever before and operate their system based on dynamic data instead of static snapshots collected with grab samples.

And these benefits have the potential to trickle down, because if a water system is not spending as much money on water treatment, pumping operations, or unnecessary repairs, they may be able to minimize the costs passed on to ratepayers.

What is the most important part of planning for utilities when looking at solutions?

BlueEdge is an a-la-carte set of solutions that allows customers to say, “What can I do now, and what do I want to do later?” Our team’s expertise is available to design solutions that will work best for each individual customer.

When you have the right software tools serving the right analytics, it enables you to do so much more with the data. And finally, when you can begin layering multiple datasets, you have an increasingly powerful decision-making tool. As utilities add pressure data, water quality data and flow data to what they can already monitor through their existing telemetry systems or asset management databases, they end up with a much clearer picture of what's happening in a system. It is important for a utility to consider where they want to be in the future because it will help them choose solutions today that can grow with them in order to scale benefits at a pace that is realistic for their organization.