Northern Ireland Water (NI Water) a government-owned company (GoCo) set up in April 2007, is the sole provider of water and sewerage services in Northern Ireland. There are approximately 795,000 domestic, agricultural, commercial and business properties in Northern Ireland connected to the public water supply and 660,000 connected to the public sewerage system. NI Water supplies 625 million litres of clean water every day for almost 1.7 million people and treats 134 million m3 of waste water each year. The company installed a Thermo Scientific SampleManager LIMS system in order to improve the efficiency of its sample management process and the integrity of the samples collected from the field.
However in order for them to ensure the integrity of the whole sampling process they decided to purchase and implement CSols Remote Sampler system. Remote Sampler is a handheld (PDA) computer based system which helps field based samplers follow the process they currently follow without having to use paper worksheets. As well as navigating samplers to their scheduled collection locations, the Remote Sampler software also allows field measurements to be taken and recorded in situ. Remote Sampler collates this with bottle ids, GPS coordinates and stores this information on the PDA device. This information like can then be transmitted back to the LIMS via broadband mobile links to save time, reduce transcription errors as well as providing a comprehensive audit trail.
Benefits
Northern Ireland Water (NIW) have enjoyed the following benefits from Remote sampler:
• the average number of samples collected per sampler per day has increased helping more easily meet the regulatory requirements and helping free up more
sampler time for emergency situations
• there are significant saving per day in printing our worksheets and registering results into LIMS (up to two man hours per day)
• NIW has a complete audit trail for clean, trade and effluent sample collection.