How Chester Metro is maximizing the productivity of their compliance team
With Kelli Johnson, Backflow Program Administration Manager at Chester Metro (SC)
190%
increase in compliance rate
400%
increase in recorded devices
20
hours saved per week
Meet Kelli — Backflow Program Administrator
While Kelli’s official title might be Backflow Program Administrator, it feels like it underplays the magnitude and importance of the work she undertakes as part of her role in the Chester Metropolitan Water District. Her role requires her to manage every aspect of the district’s backflow program — inspections, data processing and management, communication with customers, and more are all in a day’s work.
Despite this workload, she is clear on what her ultimate objective is — keeping public water safe. To achieve this, she knows that it requires her to proactively identify and monitor water hazards across the district.
Challenges
Like many municipal water utilities across North America, there was one key problem for Kelli and her team — simply not enough hours in the day to complete all the tasks required of an effective backflow compliance program.
Kelli found herself at a crossroads, grappling with the need to boost her team’s efficiency amidst ever-growing tasks.
No matter how hard they worked, it was clear that their small team was only ever going to be able to enforce partial compliance.
With their process at the time, it just wasn’t possible to stay on top of every hazard in the district, and still have time to do the office-based work.
Ultimately, the challenge was to find a way to reduce the burden of things like manual data entry, monitoring compliance rates, and sending reminders and enforcement letters to customers.
Goals
- Reduce the time spent on unnecessary manual desk-based work
- Increase compliance rates within the district
- Increase test and inspection activities with a system that enabled direct uploads from the field
Solution
The need to get as much possible done with limited human resources is a common theme amongst public water utilities. We would all love to have more help from more employees, but it isn’t always that simple. In fact, with the well-documented workforce challenges facing water utilities, it’s less feasible than ever.
A versatile cloud-based compliance solution
The time wasted by having to do paper-based inspections, and then having to manually enter them into the system was eliminated by having a cloud-based solution like SwiftComply Backflow. The ability to document inspections in the field, and have them instantly uploaded to a central database immediately eliminated half the data entry work alone.
Being able to record inspections in the field was just one benefit. Having instant access to real-time data meant that Kelli was no longer needing to return to the office ad-hoc to deal with urgent queries.
Transforming the way testers are managed
For Kelli, third-party testers are a major player in the way here Backflow Program operates.
Like many small utilities, they’re reliant on them to pick up a lot of the work that they simply couldn’t do as a team of two. However, managing any testers is something that can eat up valuable time too:
- Test Information: hours are spent validating test data manually for accuracy and completeness
- Test Certifications: hours are spent chasing testers to ensure that certifications are up-to-date
- Test Kit Calibrations: hours spent chasing testers for calibration inspection certs, sometimes with the testers being unaware that they’re required
The obvious downside of third-party testers is the time it takes to manage them.
The difference now is that all of this is done without any input from Kelli. Tests are validated for accuracy on-site before being uploaded, tester and test kit certifications are uploaded and authenticated automatically. For those that might be unaware that they need to upload these documents, they now receive automated notifications to ensure they themselves are compliant.
This ability to better manage testers has given Chester a huge boost in terms of how efficiently their program operates.