Optimize pumping station flow, energy, and uptime

No. ControlCom Connect layers on top of the controls investment you already made. The edge agent reads the PLCs and VFDs at each station over Modbus TCP/RTU, OPC-UA, EtherNet/IP, BACnet, and MQTT, and takes 4-20mA flow meters, pressure transmitters, and level sensors directly, so Allen-Bradley at one station and Schneider at the next land in the same platform. Local control logic stays exactly where it is: the PLC keeps running the station, the floats keep their hardwired backup role, and the platform adds the visibility, alerting, and reporting layer on top. Utilities with an existing SCADA typically run ControlCom Connect alongside it, using it for the mobile access, fleet rollup, and automated reporting the on-prem system was never built to deliver, then decide on the SCADA itself on their own schedule rather than under a procurement deadline.

Most pilot stations are streaming live data within a few days of installing the gateway. The edge agent runs on a small industrial PC at the station, makes outbound-only connections so nothing has to be opened inbound on the utility network, and pre-built protocol connectors pick up the PLC, the VFDs, and the instrumentation without custom driver work. From there, dashboards, alarm thresholds, and escalation paths are configuration rather than development, and a working station view is typically in place within the same week. Fleet rollouts then proceed station by station: the first site establishes the asset template, thresholds, and report formats, and each subsequent station inherits them, so site two through site fifty go faster than site one. Stations with cellular-only backhaul deploy the same way; the agent is designed for intermittent links and buffers data locally through outages.

Three ways, all from data the stations already produce. First, scheduling: pumping into peak-rate hours is the most common waste at booster and well stations, and per-station energy tracking against the tariff windows shows exactly which runtime should move. Second, efficiency: a pump operating off its best efficiency point, because of wear, a throttled valve, or the wrong duty assignment, draws more power per gallon delivered, and flow-versus-energy analytics per pump make the off-curve units visible so VFD setpoints and duty rotation can be corrected. Third, avoiding waste that looks like load: a passing check valve recirculating flow, or a leak downstream, keeps pumps running against work that delivers nothing, and the flow-to-pressure comparison across stations is what catches it. Customers typically see a 15-20% reduction in pumping energy spend once those three levers are visible and worked.

Yes. Flow totals, pressure records, runtime, and water quality readings are logged continuously with full history, and any dashboard exports as an audit-ready PDF for any historical date range, so the numbers the regulator asks for are a date-range query rather than a week of spreadsheet assembly. Scheduled report delivery sends the same package to a distribution list every cycle without anyone remembering to run it, and utilities report saving 10+ hours per month on regulatory documentation. Because every reading is timestamped and kept, the record also answers the harder questions: what the discharge pressure was during the main break, how long the station ran on the night of the complaint, which alarms fired and who acknowledged them. For utilities that also file discharge monitoring reports on the wastewater side, the same reporting engine covers DMR and permit formats on the wastewater SCADA page.

The component at the station is the edge agent, a container that makes outbound-only connections: no inbound ports are opened on the station network, which matters on cellular links where an exposed port is reachable from anywhere. Telemetry is encrypted with TLS 1.3 in transit and AES-256 at rest, and ControlCom holds a SOC 2 Type II report, available under NDA. On the platform side, role-based access controls who can see and acknowledge what, multi-factor authentication and magic-link sign-in are standard, and audit logging records who changed which threshold and when. ControlCom Connect is a hosted service on AWS; the edge agent is the only software you operate at the site, and it is read-focused, so the control layer at the station is not exposed through the platform.

Yes. Lift stations are monitored with the same architecture as booster and well stations, with the points shifted to the collection side: wet-well levels, pump runtimes and start counts, high-water alarms, and intertie status, read from the station PLC over Modbus or OPC-UA. Utilities running both drinking water and wastewater put the whole fleet in one asset hierarchy, so the on-call operator sees every station in the service area on one map regardless of which side of the system it serves, and the same alarm groups and escalation paths cover both. Treatment plants extend further into chemistry trending, chlorine residual, and discharge permit reporting, which is covered in depth on the wastewater SCADA page. The practical benefit of one platform across both is one on-call workflow, one reporting engine, and one set of operator knowledge instead of two.