Eighteen Hours To New SCADA

By Thelma Akwei and Jessica Spindler

Houghton Lake Sewer Authority (HLSA) manages a sanitary sewage facility for the townships of Denton, Lake, and Roscommon. In December of 2011, staff at the HLSA were concerned that the aging computer running their SCADA software application was in danger of failing. As their software was no longer supported by the manufacturer, they needed a new SCADA supplier. However, their budget constraint was cost-driven and required that any new, fully featured system be up and running in under a week. Two factors made meeting this tight timeline possible: the reuse of virtually all existing monitoring and control hardware and the extraordinary co-operation between the utility, the local system integrator and Trihedral.