Background
Regional water and wastewater networks present a specific monitoring challenge: assets are spread across large geographic areas, often in locations with limited communications infrastructure, and the consequence of a missed alarm — an overflowing pump station, a failed dosing system — can be significant.
This council was managing a 400km service area from two depots. The SCADA system gave adequate visibility from office workstations but operators leaving for site visits or out-of-hours callouts had no way to check system status without returning to the office.
The migration approach
Rather than a single cutover, the migration was staged by sub-region. This allowed council operators to run the old and new systems in parallel during handover periods, and reduced the risk of any single region losing SCADA visibility during the transition.
For each sub-region:
- Ignition tags configured and OPC-UA connections verified to existing RTUs
- Perspective screens built and reviewed with council operators
- Parallel monitoring period — both Citect and Ignition running simultaneously
- Alarm configuration and notification set up for mobile delivery
- Citect connection for that sub-region decommissioned
The staged approach meant the project could be delivered around council operational schedules rather than requiring extended maintenance windows across the whole network.
Outcome for the council
The Ignition licensing model — one server licence, unlimited clients — meant council could add workstations and mobile access without additional software costs. The Perspective client runs in any modern browser. Operators access the SCADA from their phones when on call.
Council IT manages the Ignition server as a standard Windows Server application. No proprietary hardware, no specialist SCADA support contract for the platform infrastructure.