Cross-connection control programs create a lot of data. When it’s good data—which is necessary to protect your public water system from contamination and ensure compliance—your program runs well. But that success depends on the quality of both your data and your data management practices.
Data Management: What You See & What You Don’t
Data management occurs behind the scenes, but you likely know many of the biggest time and dollar costs well. Things like:
- The software platform(s) used in service of cross-connection control
- Data entry of survey data and backflow preventer test results
- Customer data updates (name, address, contact information)
The reality is these only scratch the surface. Many critical data management elements hide in the background until there’s a problem. But out of sight shouldn’t be out of mind. How do you calculate and plan for the costs that are less obvious, harder to measure, and easy to overlook?
10 Gaps in Cross-Connection Control Programs
& How to Fill Them
Hard Costs
Postal Notices
You know you need to send postal notifications, and you’ve factored in the cost of materials and time to do so. But what about tracking those postal notifications: Who’s received a notification and when? Who needs additional notifications? Who’s received a non-compliance notice? Keeping track of what’s been sent, received, and responded to (or ignored) allows you to identify clear next steps for each customer. But that amount of data and frequency of change can be daunting to manage.
Device & Tester Approvals
Similarly, you factor in data entry requirements for backflow preventer tests, but you might miss the time investment required for tester verification, equipment approval, and test review. Quality control matters when water contamination is on the line, and compliance requires attention to detail that ensures proper certification of testers and test accuracy.
Data Entry, Communication, & Regulatory Risk
Manual and mismatched data management practices come with risks: Double data entry, miscommunications, and mistakes cost you both time and money. Human error can occur in any data entry situation, but passing information from the field to the office creates ample opportunities for missed, delayed, or misinterpreted information. That means you might have inaccuracies in your system that leave you open to contamination risks, regulatory scrutiny, and a greater burden on your program moving forward.
Regulatory violations specifically could result in high-cost remediation efforts or even fines. That’s quantifiable and can help you justify proactive efforts to clean up processes and build record-keeping practices that you can defend.
Training
While you can easily see the cost of the software your utility uses in managing your cross-connection control efforts, you may not consider training and adoption costs. For internal staff, they need training on effectively using and navigating software. And, if you have any turnover, those training costs multiply. For outside staff like testers, adoption can be a challenge. Getting testers into a new system (and off paper tests) takes consistent communication and education that requires a real time and dollar investment.
Qualitative Costs
Some data management costs in your cross-connection control program are even harder to pin down. Just because you can’t quantify them, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
- Lost time: With no clear ownership, data management responsibilities are spread across multiple people with competing priorities, leading to more mistakes, duplicated efforts, and hours lost each month.
- Delayed decision making: Bad data management practices leave you with incomplete, inaccurate, and untrustworthy data. If you can’t get clear insights from your data, you can’t make timely, actionable, and data-driven decisions.
- Limited scalability: As your community grows and regulations shift, you may need to expand or adapt your cross-connection control program accordingly. Things like manual data entry significantly limit your ability to scale along with your community’s needs.
So, manual data management can cost you a lot. What’s the alternative?
Mastering Data Management
Software isn’t anything new—these solutions are commonplace in utilities, especially for backflow preventer test tracking. But when we talk about manual data entry, you need more than software; you need a robust system that addresses field and office inefficiencies, as well as quality control.
The best software solutions do more than house your information like a digital filing system. Look for solutions that contain built-in mechanisms to eliminate bad data coming from the field or the office. That means verification, validation, and approval processes should be embedded in the system you use without adding hours to office staff responsibilities.
Finally, data management and the risks of bad data go beyond data entry—no matter where it takes place. You can’t track or report on information you don’t know. You need a solid and consistent field presence to:
- Identify places where proper backflow prevention is missing entirely
- Verify the continued presence of previously identified backflow preventers
- Confirm the proper installation of backflow prevention devices and assemblies
This type of field presence requires fully trained (and certified) field staff who know what to look for, how to find it, and how to effectively input the data—while on-site—in your utility’s software program(s).
Since data touches every area of a public water system’s cross-connection control program, the right tools, the right training, and the right processes are essential. Good data management practices save time and money, while helping you improve reporting mechanisms to drive safety and compliance.
Ready to learn more about how HydroCorp can support your utility’s cross-connection control and backflow prevention efforts?
