Swift Introduction

In the quest for a water service provider to optimize the service to consumers in terms of providing sufficient water at an affordable cost the need for accurate information about the system is becoming ever more important. This information is in fact available in Municipal Treasury Databases where the readings for every water meter in the system are stored on a monthly basis along with land use and other stand related information. The problem is that the treasury systems were not designed to produce the information and statistical reports required by the infrastructure managers. The data is also not spatially referenced, which would allow links to cadastral database applications in GIS. It is therefore necessary to extract the information from the databases and use additional manipulation through software designed for the purpose, to perform the required statistical calculations.

Although the calculations needed to produce the information are theoretically simple, the volume of data that is involved makes it difficult to use spreadsheets. Even in relatively small towns, where there are less than 15 000 stands, it has been found that spreadsheets become prohibitively inefficient and clumsy.

Swift was designed specifically for the purposes of the infrastructure manager and as such produces, from large quantities of information, consumption related reports required, if not by law, then for the effective management of the system. Swift has been used to produce statistics used in:

• Water Demand Management Initiatives

• Water Audits

• Unaccounted for Water Calculations

• Calculation of Water Tariffs

• Water Consumptions Profiles for User Defined Categories (e.g. Land Use)

• Water and Sewer Master Plans

• Identification of Faulty Meter Readings

• Population of water and sewer models' databases

• In addition a user-friendly query builder allows the system manager to perform any further queries on the data that may be required.