Summary: GIRHSA provides smart green solutions for each stage of the water treatment cycle from plant design, installation, operation, and maintenance. Many sites are in remote, difficult to access locations. GIRHSA uses Unitronics UniStream PLCs for plant control and the UniCloud IIoT platform to lower maintenance costs, continuously optimize plant performance and water quality —and to reveal advanced industrial IoT data analytics to reveal data-backed insights for their customers.

Wastewater treatment conserves the most vital resource on the planet. GIRHSA—SA—was founded with the goal of fulfilling automated biological and chemical wastewater treatment needs in countries where many sites are located in remote, difficult to access locations.

In 2017, the company founded PRICSA with the goal of efficiently integrating IIoT technologies into wastewater treatment plants. Today, PRICSA provides services from Guatemala to Panama in diverse sectors.

GIRHSA uses Unitronics UniStream PLCs for plant control and the UniCloud IIoT platform to lower maintenance costs—and uses UniCloud’s embedded analytic and statistic tools to provide data-backed insights for their customers.

The Challenge

GIRHSA designs, manufactures, and provides ongoing service to smart water treatment machines that automate all parts of the treatment cycle for biological and chemical wastewater treatment. Water treatment requires that the water quality be tested every 2-3 days. As many of their customer’s installations are located in remote, outlying, hard to reach locations across Guatemala, Panama, San Salvador, and Mexico, this was a demanding and costly service. In addition, GIRHSA’s organizational needs are complex, comprising a broad range of products and services: different machine types are available for direct purchase, leasing, and rent.

In searching for a solution that could , help them lower their operational costs while preserving high level of water quality,  GIRHSA began to explore Industry 4.0 options, and selected Unitronics’ UniCloud as the best solution to transform its products into smart, green machines— and satisfy customer demands for data visibility and improved, intelligent management.

The Solution

GIRHSA ‘s engineers met their challenges by embedding its water treatment plants with UniCloud, Unitronics end-to-end IoT platform, and using UniStream PLCs to automate the entire water treatment cycle, thus reducing the use of clean water for industrial use by recycling industrial wastewater.

UniCloud enabled GIRHSA to:

• Design functional, attractive, customized dashboards using UniCloud’s Dashboard Editor, displaying customer machine data in tables, charts, and graphs—without help from Cloud / IT experts / web designers. Customers and GIRHSA staff can view KPI’s such as water quality ORP (oxidation-reduction potential) at any time, on any web device. This eliminates the need to travel on-site every 2-3 days.
• Structure their organization hierarchically, supporting the different business models—direct purchase, lease, rent—using UniCloud’s management functionality.
• Create triggers in UniCloud to generate and send alerts and reports automatically.

The ability to view and monitor plant telemetry values and trigger immediate alerts to staff from UniCloud when values deviate from set limits maximizes plant uptime, by enabling immediate, remote intervention from staff members through secure UniCloud Remote Access when alerts are received.

In addition, rapid response to potential issues as indicated by continuously updated data extends machine health and lifetime. The historical data of each machine collected by UniCloud also allows staff to maximize individual machine performance.

GIRHSA was able to slash costs by implementing preventive maintenance, replacing scheduled on-site service calls with remote intervention when alerts are received, thereby greatly reducing traveling expenses. In addition, if on-site service calls are necessary, the system enables technicians to prepare ahead of time and organize necessary supplies, this increasing their efficiency.

Staying ahead of the competition requires companies to satisfy market demands— GIRHSA finds that it can now increase sales with UniCloud, by providing customers with data visibility and the Industry 4.0 IIoT technology they demand.