Devastating floods, rising sea levels, shrinking ice fields, and worsening droughts intensified by climate change, urbanisation, and population growth make water scarcity a critical global challenge. Yet as the global population increases and resource-intensive economic development continues, the supply of freshwater sources remains limited with water resources and infrastructure in many countries failing to meet accelerating demand.

In the water sector, utilities are facing sustainability challenges alongside supply infrastructure issues, floods, drought, and regulatory pressure through sustainable water management.

According to the United Nations, the way forward calls for integrated water resources management to align water use patterns with the needs and demands of different users, including the environment. This is where data, technology, and communications have a critical role to play in securing a sustainable future. That’s why water companies are at the forefront of this challenge and need to leverage technology to optimise water use, protect quality, and build resilience.

Water utility company Farys recognised the ability to address water scarcity required a unified strategy that combines digital transparency, behavioural insights, and robust infrastructure. Providing cities and municipalities in Belgium with public domain services and infrastructure management, Farys produces and distributes drinking water, monitors water safety, oversees wastewater, and manages swimming pools and sports facilities.

The company is a front-runner and role model in IT innovation and has a solid track record of using advanced technology to drive efficient, effective, and socially responsible operations that save costs whilst improving customer service and experiences. This includes investments in digital technology throughout its water networks. Towards sustainability, this improves water consumption tracking and reporting while helping its customers be more aware of their individual water usage.

Envisioning a sector-wide smart water platform

In response to the legislative push for smarter meters, high operating costs, lack of market standardisation, and the absence of a standard operating model, Farys determined the way ahead required water sector collaboration. With its strategy focused on combining digital transparency, consumer insights, and robust infrastructure, Farys joined forces with two of the biggest water companies in Flanders, namely De Watergroep and PIDPA. Together, they created a sector-wide cloud-based smart water platform that provides a future-ready smart meter and energy management solution to support a joint mass rollout of smart water meters with maximum synergy.

This collaboration has already facilitated the rollout of approximately 500,000 smart water meters to households in the region. The aim is to complete around three million smart water meter installations by 2033.

Instead of manual meter readings and data capture, the solution provides online monitoring and validation of meter readings, with the meter readings used in downstream back-end processes. And with centralised access to a multitude of data sources, events and alerts can be monitored and data visualised for internal departments.

To make this a reality, integration among various technologies responsible for sourcing data into the smart water platform is made possible through SAP Integration Suite, part of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).

Event-driven architecture through SAP BTP

Event-driven architecture sits at the heart of the water sustainability solution. Seen as a crucial component of modern enterprise integration strategies, the decoupled, asynchronous communication model helps share critical business events in real time, enhancing the speed and scalability of business interactions across diverse applications.

Behind the scenes, advanced event mesh for SAP Integration Suite provides the framework for delivering real-time visibility to over two million smart meter readings daily. Events are shared instantaneously across multiple applications for further handling, billing, and data analysis, and triggering actions based on alarms in apps. The smart water platform also leverages SAP HANA Cloud and its AI and machine learning capabilities. In addition, the SAP Datasphere solution allows the company to implement a business data fabric architecture. Together with the SAP Analytics Cloud solution, the solutions can deliver self-service analytics features that allow more users to access authoritative data. SAP Datasphere is also metre independent and supports integration with external systems and data providers.

For customers, there’s empowerment through near real-time insight into their water consumption, whilst the water companies benefit from efficiencies in administration and business operations. For the planet, the system reduces water waste through early warnings of potential leaks and bursts, and there’s reduced water consumption thanks to increased consumer awareness. And there’s also water pollution risk mitigation through early alerts to issues.

To learn more about how Farys innovated its smart water platform on SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh, join our on-demand webinar, “Farys: Enabling water management innovation with intelligent, data-driven operations.” Inge Opreel, CIO at Farys delves into the details and shows you how advanced event mesh for SAP Integration Suite facilitates numerous integrations among various technologies responsible for sourcing data in its smart water platform.