Company:
City of Suffolk, VA
Department of Public Utilities
Water Quality Laboratory
Suffolk, VA
http://www.suffolk.va.us/pub_utl/water-quality.html
Business Strategy:
The City of Suffolk Department of Public Utilities is responsible for the operation, maintenance, and expansion of the City of Suffolk's water and sanitary sewer systems. Its primary mission is to ensure the delivery of potable water and the collection of wastewater meets all State and Federal regulations. The City's water and sanitary sewer system consists of over 232 miles of water mains and 157 miles of sanitary sewer collection mains, and is supplied by potable water from the City's G. Robert House Water Treatment Plant, in Chuckatuck, and the City of Portsmouth Water Treatment Plant located within the core city.
Company Profile:
The Department of Public Utilities’ Water Quality Laboratory is currently housed at the G. Robert House Jr. Water Treatment Facility located off Bob House Parkway in Suffolk, Virginia. The Water Quality Laboratory is a certified drinking water laboratory, performing hundreds of tests per day to ensure that the City has the safest drinking water possible. Quality control testing is performed on the City’s water during all stages of the treatment process, and the laboratory maintains an intensive program of chemical and bacteriological testing for the entire distribution system.
Sample Master® LIMS at the City of Suffolk, Department of Public Utilities, Water Quality Laboratory:
The laboratory analyzes surface water, ground water, process water, drinking water and waste water from the Electrodialysis Reversal (EDR) plant. Data was previously entered into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and paper log books. However, as the amount of data increased, it became increasing difficult to manually manage the data. The City of Suffolk utilized the Request for Proposal (RFP) process to obtain proposals from firms specializing in software designed to provide a comprehensive Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) that would best meet the data information management needs of the G. Robert House Jr. Water Treatment Facility laboratory. The City desired a LIMS designed to meet quality control/quality assurance requirements for compliance with laboratory regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act and NELAC Standards. They desired a system that would be a fully operational turnkey COTS (Commercial-off- the-Shelf) solution that would include customizations, installation, training, user documentation, and data conversion services. After evaluating RFP responses and reviewing several different LIMS demonstrations, the City of Suffolk concluded that ATL and Sample Master
® LIMS fulfilled all of their requirements and was chosen as the new LIMS solution for their Water Quality Laboratory.
Since Sample Master
® LIMS is a laboratory database management system that allows the laboratory to securely store all of their data in a robust, centralized SQL database, the laboratory now has more efficient data storage. They can store laboratory, private samples and plant process data all in one database, opposed to separate Excel files on several network drives and paper log books. Bacti samples were previously logged into a log book and results were recorded on a bacti card which was stored in a card file. Finding a result from years past was a definite challenge. With ATL’s Sample Master
®, this task is now just a few clicks of the mouse.
In addition to providing the installation of Sample Master
® LIMS, ATL provided the laboratory the following services: system configuration, custom reporting, training (on-site and off-site - LIMS Boot Camp), user documentation, data conversion services and technical support with ATL’s GOLD Support Plan - truly providing the total data management solution package.
“Having ATL’s Sample Master® LIMS is like having one stop shopping. All the data generated by the laboratory is at our fingertips.”
Lynda Shaw, Water Quality Supervisor
Suffolk, VA Department of Public Utilities, Water Quality Laboratory
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