When Denver Water told Lakehurst they’d no longer be managing their backflow program, Steve Daldegan, the general manager at Lakehurst Water, had a problem on his hands.
The program had been outsourced for years and was running on paper and spreadsheets. Compliance sat at 83%, but program knowledge lived entirely in people’s heads. Now a team with no backflow experience was being asked to take it over.
“We kind of adopted this program not really knowing what we were doing,” Steve says.
Steve’s team includes Kim Hayes, who handles admin, and Brian Hodges, managing field operations. Steve calls them “the two anchors,” and he tasked them with getting the program up and running.
“What we needed was a system that had a good foundation,” Steve says. “And something that could simplify our annual reporting, notices, and surveys.”
“We just didn’t settle for the first one. I had heard good things about SwiftComply, and we felt it was going to be a user-friendly platform that fit with what we were trying to do here.”
Once they chose SwiftComply, they got to work cleaning up the database and working through the list of tasks that were due by the end of the year.
Rebuilding their database from the ground up
The team’s first job was getting a handle on their data. What they inherited from Denver Water was functional but entirely manual.
“All we ever had from them was a spreadsheet tracking assemblies,” Kim says. “They would send us copies of notices telling our customers when they needed to test, and we’d get an SOS when they were threatening to shut off water.”
Kim spent months reconciling Denver Water’s records with Lakehurst’s own tracking to make sense of the program’s historical data.
At the same time, Brian was surveying assemblies to verify what was actually installed.
The implementation process helped them work through the discrepancies in the data and build a foundation they could use going forward.
“Colin, our implementation manager, was outstanding,” Steve says. “He worked us through it. Took his time. Answered all the questions we had. And he was available for follow-up, even after implementation.”
By year-end, they’d done more than stand up the program and clean up the database. Kim and Brian had started making changes to how the program ran and compliance was climbing all the time. After just 90 days it had risen to 89.3%.
Trading notices for field visits and customer education
One of the biggest changes Kim and Brian made was reducing the number of notices they sent from three to two.
“We don’t want to keep sending notice after notice,” she says. “That’s been a bit of a challenge in terms of training our customers to realize they can’t just keep waiting till that third notice because there’s not going to be one.”
When someone fell behind, Brian’s approach was hands-on. “We don’t just shut them off,” Brian says. “We go out there and try to talk to them and get them trained to go forward.”
SwiftComply’s automated notices handled the two-notice cadence. Compliance reports showed Brian exactly which facilities were falling behind so he could prioritize field visits.
Kim also set up a section on the website for the backflow program. Customers could update their contact information, testers could register and log in. She started training testers to submit reports through SwiftComply instead of emailing PDFs.
By the end of the year, compliance had climbed to more than 96%.
“I am proud of what Kim and Brian have accomplished,” Steve says. He brought the results to the board at their monthly meeting — “They were pleased with the success that we have had with the program, especially considering none of us ever really did this before.”
