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December 27, 2021

Organica Water optimizes wastewater treatment processes while driving sustainability with Azure and Power BI

Organica facilities appear far more like beautiful botanical gardens than wastewater treatment plants. By enabling customers around the world to build and operate space- and energy-efficient biological water treatment facilities, Organica Water is helping address the challenge of urban water scarcity. With more than 120 treatment plants, it’s important to have an efficient way to remotely monitor and actively manage water quality, Organica turned to Microsoft Azure and Power BI for a solution. Today, the bio-centric company is better equipped to ensure only the purest water is made available for re-use, while advancing in their sustainability goals by reducing travel, manual work and energy use.

Organica Water

For cities around the globe, the need to operate more sustainably is growing daily. Among the resources that need most careful preservation and management is water. Particularly in the developing world, effluent limits and water quality standards are getting stricter as cities struggle to provide clean, safe water for all. This puts a greater demand on the capabilities of future and existing treatment plants. 

Companies like Organica Water are helping urban areas meet the challenge of providing safe water sustainably and at scale. “Organic technology such as ours is not only good for new wastewater treatment installations, but also for upgrading existing plants, as our technology is easily incorporated into an existing system,” says Andrea Bolgár, Senior Engineer – Technical Innovation & Data Management at Organica Water. 

With more than 120 active facilities, Organica Water needed a  way to ensure that treatment locations were run the most efficient way possible, producing effluent water meeting the strictest requirements. “It used to take up to an hour for on-site engineers to understand the effects of changing a system setting, plus even more time archiving and using that data for deeper analysis,” says Bolgár. “Also, when problems arose, we couldn’t follow up or fix them as rapidly as we would have liked.”

The company had already been working within the Microsoft 365 environment in its daily operations. It decided to try Azure and Power BI to power the solution it needed.

With the help of technology partner Systemfarmer, Organica Water moved swiftly ahead, completing the implementation in only three weeks. “Our needs required a different approach than the usual business case because we collect minute-by-minute time series data. Through our partner, we worked with an industry expert to solve the challenges involved when dealing with this kind of information,” shares Bolgár.

An efficient, energy-saving solution

Today, Organica Water’s system for remote monitoring of water quality is fluid and streamlined. “Daily data analysis starts with our on-site hardware, which gathers water quality data and sends it to the Azure IoT Hub. From there, it’s processed in the cloud by Azure Stream Analytics and passed to Power BI for the first layer of real-time data visualization. It is also sent to Azure SQL Database for storage and deeper reporting,” says Bolgár.

The remote system allows less site presence while maintaining control over the water treatment. This was significant especially during COVID-19 restrictions, when travelling to sites wasn’t possible. “We can now effectively cut down our on-site visits by half, reducing our carbon emissions from taking flights,” says Bolgár. 

The data archived also allows more in-depth analysis over a longer period of time to ensure optimal system operation. Most importantly, it has enabled Organica’s treatment plants to remotely economize on energy use, thanks to more flexible control of water oxygenation levels.

“The biggest cost in a wastewater treatment plant is water aeration because microbes in the water need oxygen to break down organic material. We run blowers to ensure enough oxygen is provided to meet the effluent limits of each plant,” says Bolgár. “Thanks to the new remote system, we can optimize our use of blowers and energy. We saw a 30 percent energy saving at one Hungarian plant, equating to about HUF3 million (USD$9,200) a month.”

This has helped equip Organica for the future in the case of energy price hikes. “Water treatment plants will be expected to continue using just as much energy as we do now to treat water to the effluent limit. If more plants applied our approach, they could cut their energy consumption down by at least 15 percent,” says Bolgár. 

The implementation has also saved time and man-hours with automation and streamlined reporting. “We don’t have to spend hours saving and processing operational data from the plants because the process is now fully automated,” says Bolgár. Obtaining reports is also quicker. “It used to take between four and six hours to draw up comprehensive reports. Now, we have a central report that we can apply to any of our plants, which only needs to be refreshed to generate results.”

“We saw a 30 percent energy saving in our plants and cut the time it took to save and process operational data.”

Andrea Bolgár, Senior Engineer – Technical Innovation & Data Management, Organica Water

Seamless collaboration

Organica Water also benefits from seamless daily collaboration with Microsoft Teams, improving the company’s sustainability and reducing its carbon footprint. “Teams allows us to communicate with our international colleagues, which has saved us travel time and cost,” says Bolgár. It is also particularly useful for communicating with on-site technicians who work with noisy machinery. Bolgár says, “The loud blowers make voice calls impossible, so it’s been more effective to send chat messages or images of technical issues using Teams.” Employees are also able to access shared information through Teams, allowing more efficient collaboration. “People can share reports and dashboards through Power BI on Teams, making it a more efficient way of collaborating with the relevant individuals,” says András Téglás, COO of Systemfarmer. 

A future with more automation

Moving forward, Organica Water wants to leverage even more Microsoft technology in its daily operations. “We’re currently looking into Power Apps integration for daily processes, as well as trying out the Azure Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence modules,” Bolgár shares. “For example, we could use AI to forecast potential pain points based on past data. This can help us prepare the system for unexpected changes such as a huge amount of water flow or pollutant load. It’s a good way to utilize the data we are gathering now.”

For the Organica Water team, the digital transformation has been a fulfilling one in tackling the challenges of urban water scarcity. “Because of our new system, we have more control over our processes and more visibility,” says Bolgár. “I think the reason for our success was that we were open to trying out new things and that we had great support behind us.” Strides like these not only make a difference at the business level, but help pave the way for more sustainable, effective water management technologies at a truly global scale.

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