The Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) is a Saudi government corporation that owns, operates and maintains desalination production and transmission plants in the Kingdom. It is the largest desalinating sea water corporation responsible for 20% of worldwide desalinated water production. SWCC aspires to be a world pioneer in seawater desalination; for this purpose, it has actively engaged in deploying best industry facilities to support its corporate vision and embarked in the organizational and digital transformation, supporting the government’s vision for sectorial reform.

A 6-Month Mission: Made Possible

SWCC recognizes that most of the information of the SWCC plants and transmission system are scattered in different formats and in the various geographically dispersed locations across the Kingdom. For this purpose, it has already taken positive steps towards the reconciliation of its information systems to establish an integrated Water Management System (WMS) that focuses on cost, risk, performance, and water quality.

The dispatch center is built based on a Business Code; the objective is to centralize and optimize real-time information of SWCC dispersed resource base. A complex mission made possible by Khatib & Alami (K&A), putting forward innovative models of work and solutions that revolutionize the way geospatial systems’ capabilities engage with SWCC operations. Dashboard, Displays and KPI’s are built to quantify this ambition. PI of OSIsoft constitutes the corner stone in the overall Information System at SWCC and, together with state-of-the-art Esri’s Geographical Information System (GIS) platform, it is facilitating further deployment of IT/OT applications to support best practice operation, maintenance and control of the Water Business.

Browse the Past, Visualize the Present and Plan for the Future

K&A surpassed numerous challenges in building the system’s architecture, such as: the sites’ infrastructure installation and integration with different systems, tag data mapping from multiple plants, design and confirmation of more than 400 PI vision business screens from scratch for plants and transmission. The new WMS will enable SWCC to be a prime player in the Water Business by monitoring the real-time operation, planning and instructing the scheduling of production and transmission in the near future and reviewing the performance of past operations. Automatic controls will harness the WMS capabilities to schedule hourly productions based on fuel prices or sell water and electricity in the future.

A Future-Proof Water Dispatch Center: Building the Foundation of the Evolution of the Water Landscape

In light of this, K&A designed a full-fledged Riyadh-based Dispatch Center for SWCC; mobilizing a team of designers, architects, engineers, IT and GIS specialists. A 15-meter wide main screen and two 4-meter side screens of the latest laser technology were installed for an optimized real-time visualization. Six operators from SWCC will control the screens, managing live displays of over 400 GIS and PI Vision graphics and diagrams. Displays are designed in a hierarchal manner: one overview for each plant/pipeline, rolling down to view water production/transmission efficiency, storage level, water quality, cost and other key monitoring parameters. The center is operational since November 2017; K&A is providing additional training and handing over.

A Trendsetting Utility Solution at OSIsoft EMEA Users Conference 2017 London

The SWCC’s business case premiere was presented at the OSIsoft EMEA Users Conference 2017 in London jointly by the K&A/SWCC team. The paper highlighted how SWCC embarked in the Digital Transformation, building a solid PI Infrastructure tightly integrated with GIS, ERP, SCADA DCS and other enterprise applications such as the production scheduling and dispatch to optimize the overall cost of water production. It also presents the approach adopted by SWCC and its successful implementation while embarking on an ambitious business transformation exercise that coincides with strategic initiatives for unbundling and privatizing the water sector in the Kingdom.