Company:
United Water
Edward C. Little
Water Recycling Facility
El Segundo, California
www.unitedwater.com
Business Strategy:
United Water provides comprehensive, sustainable water and wastewater management solutions that promote public, economic, and environmental health. United Water delivers more than just clean water. For people, businesses, and communities across the country, United Water provides sustainable solutions for essential environmental services with drinking water treatment and wastewater treatment. United Water, and its parent company, SUEZ Environment, participate in global water research and development programs with a budget of $102 million, the largest in the world. From providing state-of-the-art technology to maximizing the performance of existing infrastructure, they partner with municipalities and industries to meet specific, local needs.
Company Profile:
United Water is the contract operator for the West Basin Municipal Water District. They operate, maintain, and provide laboratory services for the Edward C. Little Water Recycling Facility and three satellite treatment plants. The Edward C. Little Water Recycling Facility (ELWRF) is the largest water recycling facility of its kind in the world. ELWRF takes in treated wastewater from the City of Los Angeles that is normally discharged to the Pacific Ocean. ELWRF further treats this water and produces five qualities of recycled water for industrial customers and for injection into the ground to prevent seawater intrusion into the aquifer in the Los Angeles basin. The laboratory tests the influent water to the main plant, throughout the treatment processes, and the final effluent from each facility. The water ranges in quality from treated wastewater effluent, to near-distilled water quality. Treatment includes conventional tertiary wastewater process (coagulation, flocculation, filtration, disinfection), to modern membrane processes (MF/RO, MF/RO/RO, MF/RO/UV-AOP). Testing includes mostly inorganic parameters, but also microbiology, trace metals, and TOC.
Sample Master® Pro LIMS at United Water Edward C. Little Water Recycling Facility:
In 1996 the ELWRF Laboratory began its search for Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS). Their initial goals for purchasing a LIMS were 1) get off a paper system of sample tracking; 2) find a LIMS that would bring modern capabilities; and 3) find a system that could be customized for their purposes without having to pay additional money each time they needed a change. The ELWRF Laboratory decided that the clear LIMS choice was ATL’s Sample Master
® Pro LIMS.
Sample Master
® Pro LIMS not only migrated the laboratory off the paper system that they were using but is a state-of-the-art LIMS that was designed to be user configurable. Sample Master
® Pro LIMS does not require source code or custom code modification to support lab-specific configuration and workflow requirements. It is a robust system that is easy to use and customize. The laboratory was able to be fully functional with Sample Master
® Pro within two months, and had very few calls to customer support in the first year. The software package has been upgraded several times since 1996 and now has over 12 years of data in one database that allows for easy trending of results from all of their locations.
Since Sample Master
® Pro LIMS is capable of receiving results directly into its database from interfaced instruments, the laboratory interfaced an Ion Chromatograph (anion analyses) and ICP/MS (trace metals and cations). Instrument integration eliminated the step of manual data entry which reduced transcription errors, increased data quality and productivity, allowing the laboratory team to do more with limited resources.
“Sample Master® Pro is software that is user friendly, easy to customize, and does everything a LIMS should be able to do. The capabilities of the software are only limited by the imagination of the user. ATL has provided excellent support for their product and is constantly adding features and functionality to keep up with the constant changes in technology and in our field.”
Gregg Oelker, Manager of Water Quality
United Water - Edward C. Little Water Recycling Facility
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