In the face of disasters and humanitarian emergencies, Veoliaforce teams mobilize and support the various Veolia Foundation partners in the field so that the affected populations can regain access to water. Hubgrade provides access to all of Veolia's expertise throughout the water cycle, ensuring optimal and permanent monitoring of installations. Together, Hubgrade and the foundation have developed VistaForce to maximize the benefits of digital monitoring during emergency missions.
Created in May 2004, the Veolia Foundation supports community-oriented, nonprofit projects contributing to sustainable development, in France and abroad. Its priority areas of action are humanitarian emergencies and development aid, employment and social links, and environmental conservation and biodiversity.
Since its creation, the foundation has provided emergency aid to ensure access to drinking water in response to both natural disasters and humanitarian crises, collaborating with such partners as Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders, Médecins du Monde, the French Red Cross, the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs’ Crisis and Support Centre, etc. To accomplish these missions, it relies on a network of volunteers among the Group’s staff called Veoliaforce; members leave for missions of up to three weeks and alternate with each other on the ground until the water supply is restored.
One equipment developed and used by the Veoliaforce teams is Aquaforce. These mobile water treatment units are used during humanitarian emergencies to produce drinking water for affected populations and health facilities.
Until today, data from the units was hand-collected in the field, with the operators recording the daily volume produced along with laboratory data such as pH, turbidity and residual chlorine. With VistaForce, the mobile water treatment units are connected to Hubgrade Essential to evaluate and continuously monitor the quality of the service and communicate with transparency.
VistaForce benefits
The advantage of installing such a system is the ability to access as much data as possible. A first step is to track the GPS location and the production volumes, both easy information to obtain.
VistaForce allows real-time production follow-up thanks to real-time data gathered by the modem and computed before being made available through Hubgrade via the data visualization and key performance indicators features. The manual entries paired with an event module allow the operator to register the lab analysis and key maintenance tasks such as membrane cleaning.
Tested and ready to deploy
The VistaForce system was tested during a training session for 30 VeoliaForce volunteers near Le Mans in France in September 2020.
VistaForce is now ready for such deployment. The use of the embedded connectivity module on the Aquaforce units will provide key data to the Veolia Foundation and its partners to report on their actions and their efficiency.