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Tag: Permitting

How Leading Utilities Manage Permit Compliance More Efficiently with Klir

Posted on by Danielle Klassen

Large utilities often juggle hundreds or even thousands of permits and regulatory reporting requirements at any given moment.

Compliance, and maintaining trust with the regulator is crucial, but managing all of these permits across functions and departments is a challenge.

Permits can change often, and the knowledge required to stay on top of them often lives with a handful of veteran employees. Meanwhile, certain permits can stay in effect for as long as a decade, so the individual responsible may change over its lifetime.

To combat this challenge, and build efficiency into the process, leading utilities of the world including the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Southern Nevada Water Authority are increasingly turning to technology. The Klir platform acts as a single source of truth for permit data, delivering real-time visibility into the utility’s compliance position. 

The outcome bolsters the agency’s ability to be proactive with the regulator, while allowing compliance teams to work smarter, not harder. 

With succession planning top-of-mind across the industry, Klir also ensures that critical organizational knowledge is retained as employees retire.

How Klir’s Technology Brings Efficiency into Permit Compliance

Klir recently sat down with Michael Thomas, Board Member at WaterStart and the Capital Investment Plan Manager for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and Nathan Allen, Executive Director at WaterStart who shared how establishing a single-source of truth simplifies the permitting process for water utilities.

“Before we had Klir, if we needed information on a permit we’d have to find the person with that information. That person would have to dig through their files to bring that information up,” says Michael Thomas.

With Klir, this data is now easily traceable on-demand.  

“It’s about how efficient you are in complying and how easy we’re making it for staff to do their jobs. That’s really what it’s about to me,” says Michael Thomas. “Whenever we have that one location, that one place where we can go for all this information. It makes our jobs so much easier.”

About Klir

Klir is a single, unified operating system for water, pulling every aspect of water management—including compliance, sampling, permitting and more—into an easy to use dashboard.

Learn more about how Klir can cut down on administration and record-keeping work, create new opportunities for collaboration, and provide system-wide visibility into your water system.

How Klir Helped SCV Water Navigate Amalgamation

Posted on by Nick Zarzycki

“I don’t think there is anything out there like Klir.”

—Keith Abercrombie, Chief Operating Officer, Santa Clarita Valley Water

At A Glance

  • As SCV Water amalgamated three water divisions under one agency, Klir supported a seamless operational transition by organizing over 150 permits into a single collaborative dashboard.
  • Complete visibility for management into live status of all permits has eliminated all risk associated with specific employees holding permitting information.
  • With permitting tasks fully managed through Klir, no deadlines are missed.

The Challenge​

In 2018, Santa Clarita Valley Water (SCV Water) was managing a massive organizational shift—amalgamating three separate water divisions into one. 

Among the many hurdles that Chief Operating Officer Keith Abercrombie and his team were facing: the complex task of understanding which permits were being maintained across the three divisions. 

With an aging workforce (80% of which is over 50) and a few key team members set to retire in the coming years, Keith and his team were driven to look for a new way to handle their permits.

In the old system, everyone knew who was responsible for managing a specific permit, but a change in the overall structure meant a change in responsibilities for many employees. 

Each permit had requirements to fulfill for a key regulatory body, and not reporting or complying would mean that the utility could be subject to a fine or penalty—which in many cases could be quite material.

Without the support of a central permitting database, and with the recent increase in permit quantity and complexity, there was simply too much risk.

The Solution

Keith and the team at SCV Water turned to Klir to pull together and help coordinate permitting information for the newly-amalgamated team.

The Klir permit management solution takes the risk of managing and complying with permits out of the individual’s hands by centralizing this information and automating the tasks and activities needed to comply across the organization.

“Klir has helped us manage and track permits and to be in a position that we are comfortable in knowing exactly what we are doing with our permits. We are not at the risk of screw ups, which can be embarrassing and costly,” says Keith. 

With permits across the organization now managed in Klir:

  • Contributors can easily keep track of deadlines and activities with automatic triggers and alerts
  • All data and requirements for 150+ permits are gathered into one permit management system
  • Employees can continue to work the exact same way as before because the Klir system builds onto existing systems and processes

“Some staff, like supervisors, worry that they could miss a deadline. Having the ability for software to tee up the events in advance, and not just for the person whose responsibility it is, but for someone else in case they are out, gives us peace of mind,” says Abercrombie.

The Impact

With a single source of truth for all permits, SCV Water has:

  • Eliminated the risk of having a specific employee handle all permitting information. Now, permit management will remain consistent when people retire or new people join the team.
  • Automated all permit-related tasks with task scheduling and notifications sent to key employees.
  • Prioritized workflows thanks to easy visibility into work on-hand, so that no deadlines are missed.

“It is a lot more than automation, it is a central database and I now know where to go to find the data I need,” says Abercrombie.

How Klir can help

Klir is a single, unified operating system for water, pulling every aspect of wastewater management—including compliance, sampling and more—into an easy to use dashboard. Learn more about how Klir can cut down on administration and recordkeeping work, create new opportunities for collaboration, and provide a level of system-wide visibility unmatched by other water data management systems.

How Klir Helps the Southern Nevada Water Authority Take its Compliance Position to the Next Level

Posted on by Nick Zarzycki

Serving Southern Nevada and the world famous Las Vegas strip, the Southern Nevada Water Authority provides potable water to 2.3 million residents and 40 million annual tourists. 

With a mandate to be the world’s most efficient drinking water utility, the SNWA relies on Klir to be more proactive and efficient when it comes to permit and Safe Drinking Water Act compliance.

“Being in compliance is extremely important. But being able to demonstrate that in an effective and efficient way is where this tool really takes our compliance perspective to the next level,” says Dave Johnson, Deputy General Manager of Operations at the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the Las Vegas Valley Water District. “The Klir application helps us to sleep better at night knowing that we can demonstrate that compliance.”

The Challenge

As a public utility, the SNWA has no room for error when it comes to permit compliance and utility operations.

With thousands of permits spread across the organization in different departments and different divisions, and 300,000 samples required annually to comply with the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), the SNWA set out to identify a technology that would allow it to bring all of its permit tracking and sampling monitoring together into one location.

“We have a big responsibility to the community, and that is to ensure a safe and secure drinking water system. Klir provides us a tool to make sure that our water is safe and secure,” says Frank Milligan, Director, Environmental Health & Safety & Corporate Security at the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the Las Vegas Valley Water District.

The Solution

  • Klir provides peace of mind for management with complete visibility into the utility’s live status of compliance.
  • Centralizing 1000+ regulatory permits into a single dashboard eliminates information silos. 
  • SNWA analyzes over 300,000 water quality samples every year. Klir provides a tool to track and manage that sampling data, allowing the SNWA to ensure its in compliance and meeting ratepayers’ expectations each day.
  • With time saved on compliance admin, staff time can be redirected towards high-value proactive work.

The Impact

The Klir drinking water management platform allows SNWA to consolidate and manage all of its 1000+ permits and 300,000+ water samples in one place.

  • With a single software system to consolidate all of its permits and Safe Drinking Water Act sampling outcomes, the SNWA can deliver compliance more efficiently.
  • Management has complete visibility into the organization’s real-time compliance position, all within a single dashboard.
  • Permits are kept current and legal with no deadlines missed.
  • Staff time that would otherwise be spent on administrative tasks can be redirected to high value work such as conducting inspections, or hazard abatement action.
“The real value proposition in the Klir software is that it allows us to become much more efficient in how we deal with these massive amounts of data.”
Dave Johnson
—Deputy General Manager of Operations, SNWA and LVVWD

How Klir Can Help

Klir is a single, unified operating system for water, pulling every aspect of water management—including compliance, sampling, permitting and more—into an easy to use dashboard.

Learn more about how Klir can cut down on administration and record-keeping work, create new opportunities for collaboration, and provide system-wide visibility into your water system.

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Book a demo with our team and receive the latest industry insights and exclusive offers.

Request a Demo

Book a demo with our team and receive the latest industry insights and exclusive offers.