Do not throw away your water just because you heard it will be raining

Bika Mail, 27 September, Cape Town

Catching up, the implementation of Bika Water at HydroChem water specialists, Melbourne; AWTC Water Treatment Consulting, NY; and Test It Lab, Bloemfontein can be considered successful.

HydroChem and AWTC offer a set of water analysis and treatment services for corrosion control, both chemical and microbiological, and wrt Legionella health and safety management. Other services are related to filter performance, water reuse and recycling, and equipment inspections. Cooling and heating waters are monitored and treated based on analytical results.

Through these procedures, facility owners and operators increase efficiency of heat transfer apparatus and extend the life of critical and expensive boiler, condenser and cooling systems.

HydroChem, in Australia, uses Bika for a big number of water treatment systems at sites nationwide. To manage them, the lab sponsored a Sample Point Location feature, expanding sample collection points into a two tier structure, Locations and their Sample Points, typically a water treatment facility and its collection points. Results are reported per location in a new set of COAs.

The LIMS location DB is synced with the company’s customer care system daily to ensure the correct information is used on COAs communicated to location managers.

This design has already found further use at an university lab doing aquaculture research - shrimp samples are taken from any of a number of ponds per location.

AWTC sponsored Bika's Fulcrum field result importer, capturing measurements and observations on site during sampling before loading it to Bika back at the lab.
The lab established a fixed format for results returned from subcontracting labs and sponsored their import too. A Hach instrument interface and custom COA for inhouse distribution round off a well matched system.

ISO 17025 accredited Test It delivers water quality management services to various Free State municipalities and their treatment plants, hospitals, schools and swimming pools, supermarkets, as well as to clients in agriculture and industry.

Test It deserves a LIMS case study on its own, getting the most out of Open Source by taking much of the implementation tasks on themselves with only occasional professional support. After sponsoring the coding of reference sample expiry alerts, lab manager Francois le Roux customised and released the Test IT COAs himself.

Francois also developed a field sampling app - registering samples and their attributes, the analyses requested, field results and a client signature at the sample point. The sample records are posted to the LIMS in the bulk sample import format.
The client signature is included on an emailed receipt, followed by a whatsapp notification, and invoice creation in Xero!

There is home for any lab in Open Source. Project participants - traditional users, fee paying clients and professional engineers - all ingeniously work towards their own goals and by so doing benefit all. New participants inherit 2 decades of quality peer reviewed code.

For all lab disciplines - different tests, methods, specifications and sample types. Most labs only interface their instruments and configure the rest for a good fit.

Contact us for setting a demo installation set up with examples of your own configuration data.

Until next time, best regards
Team Bika