Challenge #2: Increasing infrastructure complexity
For many water managers – for example those handling and managing wastewater – the scope of their job and responsibilities has grown significantly in recent years. Today, water managers are being asked to do more than ever, with limited resources.
In wastewater, new regulations and sustainability initiatives have an ongoing impact on managers’ jobs. The days when they were responsible for relatively simple treatment processes are long gone. Now, they’re also tasked with removing micro-pollutants, extracting reusable raw materials from wastewater, and even producing renewable energy directly.
Naturally, those new tasks and responsibilities have had an impact on the complexity of water management infrastructure. Today, there is an ever growing number of steps in water processing chains, with greater interdependencies between process steps and plants.
That also adds to the challenges of knowledge transfer and upskilling. When a new employee joins a water management team, they’re often faced with complex, imposing infrastructures and environments that they need to master quickly.
Fortunately, once again, digitisation is helping to solve this. By laying out these complex processes using digital twins, they become easier to map and understand. The picture might be complex, but at least you can see everything – and critically, understand all the nuanced process interdependencies in the modern plant environment.