Fairfax Water's Tammy Powlas on producing good quality water cheaply

Fairfax water is a US-based public water utility in Virginia. I spoke to Fairfax Water's Senior Business Analyst, Tammy Powlas (aka @tpowlas) recently about Fairfax, and how it was able to produce good quality water cheaply.

Transcript of our chat:
Hey everyone! Welcome to GreenMonk TV. I am talking today to Tammy Powlas who is a senior business analyst with Fairfax Water. Tammy, water utilities, it's an interesting field and one that we don't talk about enough often. I think people take water for granted often, but it's one of our more valuable resources. Can you give us a bit of background first on Fairfax Water? What kind of size are you, who do you deliver water to, and what kind of challenges you're facing, that kind of thing.

Okay, yes, Fairfax Water, we are the largest water utility in the State of Virginia. Currently, we serve 1.7 million people water, and one out of every five Virginians gets their water from us. We serve the Fairfax County and surrounding counties. One of our challenges or immediate challenges is we're acquiring two new water utilities in our area. The other thing about Fairfax Water, we pride ourselves on being one of the lowest cost water utilities in the Washington, D.C., Virginia, Maryland area.

Great! So you give cheap water to people. Does that necessarily mean that's good water?

Oh, absolutely! We have a lab group who does testing. We have two sources of water. They are very active in testing that. Our customers can request at anytime, what's the quality of the water. So we pride ourselves on giving the best lowest cost water in the D.C. area, and it's always available.

And to coin the phrase, do you eat your own dog food, are you a --

Yeah, I am a Fairfax Water customer. I live in Fairfax County. I have been a Fairfax Water customer since 1999. I've had good service from Fairfax Water as a customer. I do eat my own dog food, yeah.

So how do you manage to keep the prices down?

Well, for us, I think it comes from the general manager on down. We are public sector water utility, I forgot to mention that. So revenue, we're not tied to revenue, but we pride ourselves on always doing what's the least cost or what's the most cost efficient thing for our customers. So everything always has to have a business case. We do a cost benefit analysis, and it's always questioned from the general manager, the finance manager, is this going to fit our customers, is this the best solution for our customers. So we pride ourselves on always thinking in those terms and the whole company does.

Okay. Is technology helping out at all?

Oh, absolutely! We've been using the SAP utilities solution since 2004, and that has really helped us integrate all our solutions together from billing, from maintenance, and very importantly, financials. So that helps us manage the cost, manage our maintenance, manage our bills, everything is all together. We have integrated financial statements in SAP that even using a business object software, it's all come together and really helped us be more efficient for our customer.

Okay. I mean water utilities, and utilities in general, have large issues around infrastructure management. How do you handle that?

That's handled also in SAP using the Plant Maintenance Solution. We've been lucky, because our infrastructure is relatively new compared to our surrounding utilities, surrounding jurisdictions like Washington, D.C. which to me has a lot of issues with the aging infrastructure. So for us, we're very active in predicting what's going to go wrong, planning our maintenance, so that's part of our whole company.

Sure! I mean what are plans moving forward for tech roll outs and the interesting projects on the horizon, to help you better serve your customers?

Oh, absolutely! For sure after data migrations, I would see it's giving more visibility into how our customers are using the water, how am I consuming the water, how do I compare to my neighbors. So we've been relatively lucky. We haven't had to tell our customers to boil the water, we haven't had water shutoff, we don't regulate the water and say you can only water on every other day. So we've been fairly lucky with that. But, I think given that people want to be more sustainable, I think they are going to want to see how am I managing my water and how am I consuming and how do I compare to my neighbors.

And smart meters?

Smart meters, we have not looked at that yet. I think that is coming. What's interesting is some of these jurisdictions that we're getting, they have automated meter readings, and I think that will come. I think that's got to be on the horizon. I am giving you my personal opinion, I don't speak to Fairfax Water but I think that's going to happen for sure, because I think the customer demand hasn't happened yet, but I think that's going to happen over time.

As people see the advantages of the smart meters for electricity. Yeah, absolutely! I can see that today with my own electric....

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