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The Issue at SNWA and LVVWD

Permitting requirements for large water utilities like the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) and the Las Vegas Valley Water District (LVVWD) can be an extremely time intensive process requiring a great deal of man-hours. Anything to help make the permitting process more efficient can lead to large cost savings for an organization, which is why SNWA and LVVWD wanted to pilot new technology that would streamline more of their permitting related processes.

SNWA and LVVWD have permits that range from:

environmental permits dealing with environmental regulatory compliance
municipal permits when dealing with maintenance issues and maintenance projects,
county, state and a city permits for digging into the street and closing down streets,
groundwater permits for extracting, treating and delivering drinking water,
rights of way permits,
wildlife and sensitive species permits for work along the Las Vegas Wash and Virgin River
various permits required to meet compliance for the Safe Drinking Water Act among others.

All in all, SNWA and LVVWD are managing and tracking around 3,000 different permits.

SNWA and LVVWD use a variety of programs and applications to manage their permits from in-house programs to spreadsheets to track various reports, renewals and compliance requirements associated with their permits. There is really no comprehensive program used organization-wide to help the water utilities manage the high volume and complex permitting processes and compliance requirements.

The Solution

SNWA and LVVWD saw an opportunity to dramatically change the way these permit systems were being managed by partnering with Klir on a WaterStart pilot project. The Klir technology was one of the only comprehensive systems on the market, which is what was appealing to SNWA and LVVWD. Klir is a modular SaaS platform that centralizes workflows and data for environmental regulation, compliance and quality. There are various other companies in the market that provide permitting solutions, but they typically are only for specific types of permits. For example, there are several different companies that deal primarily with regulatory compliance permitting for the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Air Act etc. These may not offer solutions that deal with water quality monitoring and permitting, or various other types of permits, which is what was needed at SNWA and LVVWD with so many different permitting requirements. Klir provided a compliance and regulation platform that is built specifically for water utilities which can cater for multiple business areas including Permit Management, Sample Management, Violation Management and Audits. The potential for scalability of the Klir platform is something which appealed to SNWA and LVVWD.

Steven Ross is a Senior Environmental, Health and Safety Analyst at LVVWD who helped lead the pilot project. Ross mentioned, “A comprehensive system like Klir helps us pull all of these different permits together to track all the various requirements of the permitting process. It also helps us to collaborate better within our organization among different workgroups to ensure we can get the necessary information to maintain compliance of our permits.”

Klir Permit Management is a cloud hosted solution that holds and lists all of an organization’s permits in one central place. The Klir dashboard displays high level information for all permits in the organization including permit types, the permit numbers, the employees responsible for each permit in each department, the renewal dates, compliance information and more. Data can be quickly sorted with various filters such as department, permit type and open tasks. Information can be managed and viewed by multiple users across multiple departments supporting seamless cross functional collaboration.

Out of the 3,000 permits at SNWA and LVVWD, the initial launch of Klir included the management of approximately 100 permits which primarily included minor source air permits, distribution and maintenance permits, wildlife permits and environmental compliance permits.

Management can quickly view a rolled-up summary of pending & active permits through the Klir dashboard. This gives management an organizational level view of important dates that are approaching, how well the organization is doing in maintaining the permits, permits that might be due for renewal and any notices about being out of compliance. Management can then assign specific employees to various tasks associated with each permit, which can then be viewed and monitored by all. This makes it very easy and streamlined to identify who?s responsible for renewing the permit, submitting a report on the permit, finding specific information and entering information that needs to be tracked for that permit moving the organization from reactive permit management to procative permit management.

There are three critical processes associated with the Klir system: 1) obtaining permits and gathering the information and team members to make a permit application, 2) managing of that permit after it’s been issued by the regulatory agency and 3) managing non-compliance or issues outlined in the permit. The initial focus at SNWA and LVVWD was on the management of the permits and the solution is now being expanded to additional users to include permit application and management of any non-compliances or issues.

Results of the Pilot

The pilot has been launched just to evaluate its feasibility and use. SNWA invested $50,000 to develop the pilot and has been satisfied with what they are finding to this point. “I’m really pleased with it,” said Ross. ” We currently have an in-house system that we developed about 10 years ago which only tracks our environmental health and safety permits; however, this technology is more dynamic and provides us greater opportunities to track an array of permits across different departments in an easy, user-friendly interface.”
There’s a function within the Klir system that allows users to collaborate with other users that might need to provide certain information. SNWA and LVVWD see this as a program that could work well on a larger scale and provide management with a tool to see and understand how things are working and how compliance is being managed for the utilities’ various regulations and permits.
Performance

The Klir team worked with SNWA in advance of the launch to identify a set list of success criteria and these were all successfully met as part of the initial launch of the Klir Permit Management solution. In addition, the Klir team met all agreed deliverable dates and worked closely with SNWA throughout the process to ensure the Klir solution met their business needs. Although specific operational metrics were not measured, SNWA and LVVWD see the Klir technology as a system that has the ability to save a lot of man-hours, especially for organizations that have significant permit requirements. Oftentimes, organizations will submit a permit application that gets kicked back by the regulator for not providing all of the required information. Steve believes the Klir system will provide strong cost savings and efficiency in managing this process. The largest overall savings and benefits will come from having just one system for tracking almost everything needed for permits. “I think a lot of different departments will use this,” says Ross.

Permits usually have an expiration, they usually have reporting associated with it and they usually have something that needs to be tracked, and the Klir technology allows you to do all of that. Maintaining the data in a centralized system helps management keep an eye on things and stay informed, rather than relying upon different types of disjointed information and inputs from different directions. Overall efficiency improvement is what SNWA and LVVWD believe is the biggest benefits they will be seeing from this technology.

The pilot was intended to observe whether the specific technology will work for SNWA and LVVWD, and Steve says it has been going great to this point. “So far it’s looking good. So far working with Klir has been really great.” According to Ross, all of those within the organization who has been involved in the pilot have expressed that this technology is going to help them in their jobs a great deal.

Continued Adoption

LVVWD and SNWA are exploring other opportunities within the organizations to use the Klir technology, including at its water quality laboratory. SNWA is currently in discussions with Klir to develop a module that will help laboratory staff schedule and track progress with required monitoring under various rules and requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act. The program is currently in the design phase with the intention that the Klir module will interface with the laboratory’s current information management system.

SNWA has signed up on a 7-year term with Klir for the Permitting module and have subsequently added on the Klir Sample Management Module. Language has also been added to the Klir contract to allow any public body in the USA to purchase the company’s software without the need for procurement by using a “joinder” or piggyback agreement.

About Klir

All utilities no matter what their size note that ‘operational efficiency is critical to their success’ and ‘regulation management accounts for the majority of operational effort which incurs a substantial cost’. All of this is underpinned by the fact that most regulation management occurs outside systems. There is no single source of truth in utilities and up to 50% of regulation managers time is spent sourcing data manually. Where IT systems have been developed the cost is prohibitive for almost all municipalities.

The Klir platform is purpose-built by water regulatory compliance experts for water utilities. It recognizes that managing compliance data in a utility is a cross-functional activity, with each function having varying objectives and needs. Klir is a modular SaaS platform that centralizes workflows and data for environmental regulation, compliance and quality. The Permits Management module caters for the application process and management of all permit types in one system, providing a one-stop shop for permit applications across the utility. Having all permit data in one central place gives management a birds-eye view of permits across the organization and the status of each permit in real-time.

Issue Facing Southern Nevada Water Authority

To keep the Las Vegas water system’s roughly 6,500 miles of pipeline and associated infrastructure operating efficiently, Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) and Las Vegas Valley Water District (LVVWD) engineering teams must work with hundreds of thousands of engineering and design documents.

“Every day, we are pulling record drawings to initiate maintenance, plan for work orders, or perform standard operational activities,” said Greg Kodweis, director of infrastructure management for the SNWA. “So, it is imperative that we have efficient access to these records.” Managing these documents can be a challenge as they are frequently modified and may repeatedly change hands electronically or in print form. These situations leave room for problems like duplication, human error and having multiple versions of documents stored in different places.

Las Vegas’ water agencies recently addressed these challenges by deploying an innovative cloud-based system designed by Australian tech company, RedEye, to manage their engineering drawings. The change now saves the agencies 448 man-hours and tens of thousands of dollars each month.

Result of Pilot

When the SNWA began integrating the RedEye DMS cloud platform in early 2017, the tech company researched the water agency’s existing systems and found multiple management systems in place that required effective integration into the cloud. There were more than 100,000 document duplications and, overall, several hundred thousand documents needed to be accessed by roughly 300 employees efficiently and from a variety of devices.

The departments involved included: Engineering Services, Inspections, CAD and GIS Post Construction, M.E. Design, Distributions, and Maintenance Engineering. After implementing the cloud-based solution to store the critical documents, the water agencies realized a man-hour savings of 448 hours per month.

Using the cloud also helped to mitigate certain risks for the water agency including data search inefficiencies, file exchange delays, review/approval complexities and miscommunications. RedEye’s research also found that with the elimination of hard copies, the water agencies were saving $1,000-plus a month on project folders alone.

The cloud-based solution helped to create “a single source of truth for all drawings,'” explained Dave Shaw, general manager of RedEye North America. “With around 300 users and 12 other applications integrated with RedEyeDMS, users can access and start working with the latest versions of engineering drawings anywhere on any device.”

Listen to an in-depth interview about this pilot project with Greg Kodweis of SNWA:

RedEye and SNWA Pilot

About RedEye DMS Technology

With RedEye DMS, documents are not stored on desktops and handed off through emails or in paper form; they are stored in the cloud and accessed by all needed parties, from all types of devices, including desktops, tablets and smartphones. Documents are also modified, updated and approved in real-time through the technology.

“Through RedEye, we can pull these drawings from within the confines of our offices or right out in the field using tablets and mobile devices, something we couldn’t do prior,” Kodweis added.

In the past, teams would also need to mark-up hard copies or make “redlines” in the field, then submit those changes to the SNWA engineering group, a multi-step, error-prone process. “[Now] Those field markups and redlines are uploaded to the cloud and immediately incorporated into the final drawings. Having a record drawing management system like this gives our guys in the field confidence that they are using the most current version of the drawings,” Kodweis added.

https://redeye.co/

Further Impacts in Southern Nevada and Beyond

The SNWA-RedEye relationship was initiated by WaterStart, which joined the Governor’s trade mission to Australia in August 2016. The cost for researching and initially implementing RedEye DMS was $50,000, which was split between the SNWA and WaterStart. It was a decision that quickly paid back the 3x return WaterStart aims for with its investments, said WaterStart’s Executive Director, Nathan Allen.

With the successful implementation of RedEye DMS, the Australian company also established its North American headquarters in Las Vegas. “With three local employees in place, RedEye will continue to invest revenues towards recruitment of more tech talent”, Shaw added. “This strategic partnership will pull new innovations to the U.S. and further development of Nevada’s water technology cluster,” added RedEye’s co-founder and CEO, Wayne Gerard.

RedEye has also been expanding other offerings. It is currently in full development of RedEye WFM, a cloud-based workforce mobility solution that helps to digitize paper processes and simplify workflows for organizations. As the technology advances and is embraced by U.S. water utilities and other sectors, the opportunity for further water tech employment in Nevada increases. And by landing in North America with an active client in place, RedEye was able to start operations with critical cashflow and business momentum.