Dimagi, along with partner Acumen Fund, has implemented a system for collecting and monitoring information on reverse-osmosis (RO) water treatment plants for a company based in Ahmedabad, India. The purpose of the system is to record a handful of critical data points for each water plant each day, so that the maintenance team can carefully monitor plant health and deploy repair crews only when plants require maintenance, thereby reducing unnecessary travel expenditure.
The system developed by Dimagi allows an RO plant operator to record several pieces of information (e.g., inlet pressure on the RO membrane; outlet pressure; liters of water purified; electricity consumption; etc.) and send this information in a compact SMS message to a specified number. The SMS service provider forwards the text and phone number to a Java Servlet developed by Dimagi, where the message is processed and its information is stored into a Google Spreadsheet. If the message is processed successfully, a success response is displayed to the user, and if the message could not be processed successfully, a descriptive error message is displayed.
A second Java Servlet is responsible for reporting on the recorded information. By logging in using a web browser, the maintenance staff can view different reports on the data. For example, one report shows a daily snapshot of the data for all water plants. Another report displays data for a single water plant over a defined period of time. A main feature of the reporting side of the system is that information is flagged and highlighted if it is outside the range of normal values. As the company opens more and more water plants, this automatic flagging of exceptions will allow maintenance crews to identify failing water plants more quickly and easily. The ongoing cost of the system is roughly $130 USD per annum for the web hosting service, and $130 USD per annum for the SMS Gateway service. The fee per SMS is only paid by the subscriber, the SMS gateway is passed to the system at no cost.
The backend of the system, comprised of Google Spreadsheets, is very flexible, allowing for the addition of new water facilities for which to monitor, new pieces of information to record, and customization of the threshold of acceptable values for a given piece of information.
About Acumen Fund
Acumen Fund is a nonprofit venture fund that invests in market-oriented approaches to deliver critical, affordable goods and services to the world’s poor. Acumen Fund focuses on the convergence of philanthropic capital and business expertise to produce sustainable, scalable enterprises that reach underserved markets and increase access to the opportunities of the global economy. For more information on Acumen Fund’s activities and investments, visit www.acumenfund.org.
