Critical Sewers™ Cloud App

No Hardware, No Middleware, No Software!

As a SaaS provider, Electro Scan — not our customers — is responsible for providing hardware, middleware, and user interfaces ensuring uptime, periodic maintenance, and system diagnostics. Using Critical Sewers™, our customers can save money, reduce headaches, and rest easy knowing that Electro Scan is diligently monitoring your system for you.

Go Live in 1 Hour!

Take advantage of pre-built and configurable dashboards, alerts, reports, and analytics.

Always Be on the Current Release

Unlike the traditional software model, there are no major annual upgrades. Electro Scan schedules periodic updates and enhancements to Critical Sewers™ at no cost to our customers, providing they are covered by a current support plan.

Low Cost of Ownership

Electro Scan’s Critical Sewers™ Cloud Computing app eliminates the need for additional hardware, software or on-going upgrades. More imprtantly, it reduces IT support by empowering business users to self-serve.

Your New Decision Support Tool to Fix Critical Sewers

Designed for Commercial Plumbers, Sewer Contractors, and Municipal Sewer Utilities, Electro Scan’s Critical Sewers™ Cloud Computing app allows your data to be stored, accessed, and presented like never before.

Key features include:

• Dashboard – The ability to display a Dashboard of management reports, including easy to see dials, charts, and graphs representing all electro scans generated from the field. Since Electro Scan has adopted an industry standard multi-tenant architecture, customers will only see information transmitted from their own electro scan devices with the ability to display tables by Date, Location, Operator, Scan Measurements, and Severity. Office personnel can easily access up to the minute electro scan results and drill down into the data to see specific details of any electro scan. They will be able to access a digital ortho of the surroundings where the scan took place so the service operator can meet the customer and propose additional services to correct problems.

• Electro Scan Analysis – The ability to either print a hardcopy report to a ruggedized printer or electronically transfer data to the Electro Scan cloud computing application for office personnel to review online and recommend repairs. Critical Sewers™ Cloud Computing reporting is more than just storing electro scan readings from your Smartphone — its a whole new paradigm in advanced data analytics that allows users to map electron scan readings to specific joints, compare electro scan readings to historical CCTV inspections, and allows executives to view a private benchmarking of results that can be displayed by field worker or employee, severity, and other key performance metrics. Requires either a Premium Support Plan, Platinum, or PlatinumPLUS Support Plan.
•  Reverse Plot Direction.  The trace display can be reversed so that the Start manhole (MH) becomes the End MH, and vice versa. When the trace is reversed, the locations of joints, anomalies, pressure tests, CCTV observations, etc., are all reversed to preserve their relationships with each other.
• Threshold Levels and Grading. Variations of the electric current over distance is recorded and displayed as a plot. This is called a scan. Analysis of the scan is carried out by selecting a level just below the smallest defects. This is the threshold level. Anomalies are regions on the plot where the levels recorded are above a threshold level. The location and length of an anomaly shows a defect. A defect’s size is graded as large, medium or small according to the electrical measurement. Scan measurements are relative to the segment of pipe being scanned based pipe size, composition and ground conditions.
• Pipe Joint Anomalies. Scan anomalies associated with pipe joints are identified as part of the analysis. This allows anomalies from structural defects to be categorized. These defects include service connections and pipe cracks that leak. Most pipe joints have a standard length of 3’, 4’, 5’, etc. These lengths may vary depending on the manufacturer. This difference can be significant when plotting joint markers at a fixed interval over 50 or so pipe lengths. Pipe joint anomalies that correspond with pipe length are plotted as regular intervals.
• Pipe Joint Fitting & Plotting. Adjustments are made for the scaling, offsets, threshold, grading, and plot direction. This can be easily changed after the analysis. Small adjustments can be made so that the joint indicators correspond with the regularly spaced anomalies.
• Plot Displays and Print Adjustments. Oftentimes the best way to support recommendations to city councils and advisory boards is to create a custom display that plots defects. This feature allows electo scan traces to be plotted and reviewed prior to hardcopy printing or to be included in a custom softcopy report.
• Comparative Analysis – Investor-owned and municipal utilities are overflowing in data gathered both from outside service contractors and internal staff. Closed circuit televion inspections, smoke testing, dye flood tests, pressure test, and manhole inspections are just some of the standard field inspections that have been collected for nearly 30 years. While some vendors have done their best to stay abreast of customer’s ever increasing need to sift through electronic data, Electro Scan’s Critical Sewers Cloud Computing app allows you to upload your existing records, including Sewer Mains, Manholes, and Service Connections, and compare legacy inspection points to electro scan plots traced against the same sewer pipe. Failure points identified with Electro Scan can be easily compared to previously collected CCTV observations, with a legend displayed at the bottom. Since principals of Electro Scan have worked with a variety of consulting engineers and successful electro scan projects, its pre-existing wastewater collection data model is fully compatible to easily mirror your existing data against the electro scan standard to determine precise defect locations.
• Best Practices Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – Available for municipal customers only, this feature allows a confidential peer group analysis of similar-sized agencies, to help understand the common issues faced by other utilities.

Contact Electro Scan today to find out how you can begin solving your critical sewers with the most advanced technologies available.

Basic Support Plan

Standard with all ES-38™ and ES-660™ products, Basic Support covers toll free customer support and one-year of our CloudConnect™ Smartphone app, including all software updates, at no charge. Available with or without the purchase of an ES-Zebra Field Printer, Electro Scan’s Basic Support Plan allows you to access periodic updates to our Smartphone application for twelve months, downloaded as part of your regular Android or Apple iPhone applications. While electro scan reports can be either displayed on your Smartphone or printed to your ruggedized field printer, no data is accessible from Electro Scan’s cloud computing web application. If you decide you want access to all your electro scans, you can upgrade from a Basic to Premium Support Plan at any time and get immediate access to all electro scan results since becoming a customer.

Premium Support Plan

Access all inspections uploaded to Electro Scan’s Critical Sewers™ Cloud Computing application (no software installation required), dedicated to the data storage, access, and analysis of Electro Scan inspections. Supervisors can access results to support job quotes and have them transmitted to the field for printing.

Platinum Support Plan

Electro Scan’s Platinum Support Plan provides toll free customer support for your CloudConnect Smartphone, plus access to Electro Scan’s Critical Sewers Cloud Computing application, including Executive Dashboard, Scan Analysis, and Comparative Field Reporting comparing electro scan results with legacy field inspections.

Platinum^PLUS Support Plan

Electro Scan’s PlatinumPLUS Support Plan provides toll free customer support for your CloudConnect Smartphone, plus access to Electro Scan’s Critical Sewers Cloud Computing application, including Executive Dashboard, Scan Analysis, Comparative Field Reporting comparing electro scan results with legacy field inspections.

A key aspect of Electro Scan’s PlatinumPLUS Support Plan includes the ability to maintain your data on existing severs, with custom web services developed to seamlessly display your data within Electro Scan’s Critical Sewers Cloud Computing application.

Myth #1.  My Data is Not Safe in the Cloud.

It is, if you do things right! Any new technology is an easy target for “it’s not secure” attacks, yet despite the fact that many of us are IT savvy, a common misperception persists: cloud-computing has vulnerabilities that are greater than those faced by traditional enterprise infrastructures, when in fact they’re very nearly the same.

Let’s take a step back here and remember that at a fundamental level, cloud computing is just operating systems, applications, and content operating from a data center much like any other enterprise data center.

Security clearly matters a great deal to cloud vendors who will want to ensure a fail-safe—even bulletproof, environment. So while vendors may vary in the standards to which they pledge allegiance, Electro Scan has selected the most highly rated off-premise cloud computing resource, Rackspace Hosting, to serve its cloud computing applications.  Occupying the top right quadrant to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Analysis for Cloud Computing, Rackspace ensures the security, performance, scalability, and reliability typically not available from on-premise servers.  Protecting your data security is Electro Scan’s a high priority, with stringent service-level agreements (SLAs) monitored and enforced, since our inception. 

Myth #2.  I Will Have to Stop Using My Client/Server or Web Apps, if I Decide to Use the Electro Scan Cloud.

No.  Electro Scan offers a brand new way to evaluate your sewer network and as a result is introducing a new breed of analytics and asset integrity measurements for decision support.

Electro Scan inspection results bring a whole new level of advanced analytics to understanding your critical systems, especially when compared to legacy CCTV inspection data.  Due to the complexity and proprietary nature of Electro Scan’s scientific-based algorithms it is not cost effective to license and train third-party asset management and computerized maintenance management system vendors.

Instead, due to the common data format and presentation of sewer main and lateral CCTV inspections, Electro Scan can either provide a bi-direction interface between our client’s client/server or web services-based systems, or build a web service to provide online data comparison between Electro Scan and CCTV inspection results.

Myth #3. IT Loses Control and Ownership to the Cloud Vendor.

As corporate IT models evolve and new ones arrive, so do fears about loss of direct control over systems, data, and processes. The idea that a company’s or city’s servers and data are located elsewhere—when the precise location of “elsewhere” is unknown to the IT department—understandably lends itself to some degree of concern about ownership and control. Because after all, if there’s an outage, performance dip, or data compromise who gets blamed?  IT, of course.

Electro Scan believes there is little to fear.  Just because an organization doesn’t own a data center or pay the operators does not mean that it loses control over the information and software. Our Service-level agreements are second to none.

Myth #4. There are Hidden Costs in Cloud Computing.

One significant benefit to a cloud computing Software as a Service (SaaS) approach is that you can always count on your monthly cost.  No software, no hardware, no middleware, and no-hassle software upgrades.  A detailed price breakdown per user can go a long way toward dispelling concern about hidden costs and high expense with round-the-clock availability, whether at your office, maintenance yard, field service center, or home.  Besides, it’s a question of value, not just cost.

Make it simpler to scale consumption up or down as needed
• Reduce your helpdesk demand
• Improve your customer service
• Build your reputation
• Boost reliability

Myth #5. My Data Will be Held Hostage if I Decide to Switch Vendors and Want to Move My Data

All raw data collected from Electro Scan inspections is always accessible to licensed customers, however business analytics, dashboards, and end user reports, permanently reside within the cloud architecture.

As with some of the myths above, a great deal of assurance can be had from simply reviewing standard contracts in detail and in having frank discussions with vendors about their policies. Ensuring that your legal representatives are completely up to date on issues of cloud security before you kick off any vendor relationship is simply smart policy.

However, given the hypothetical case of a cloud vendor who would stoop to withholding data to blackmail a customer into remaining on its rolls, despite the instant death of customer satisfaction and the hail of bad PR that would follow, there are options for ensuring that this never happens to your organization.

One key option is to have an external data backup solution independent of the cloud vendor. Vendors like Backupify (which has no relationship with this site or its contributors) offer independent cloud backup services for Google Apps domain data. Another is to adopt the use of a portable database format as a standard emerges.

Myth #6.  Cloud Apps Are ‘One Size Fits All’ and Will Not Work For a Big Public Agency Like Mine.

This myth deals with the perception that only one, big, fat, monolithic version of a given application is available to all customers, none of whom can therefore expect it to precisely meet the needs.  This simply isn’t the case with Electro Scan since it offers an advanced, multi-tenant architecture, that can scale from the smallest commercial plumber to the largest sewer authority.

First, cloud applications are too often assumed to be precisely equivalent to Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions that may be hosted on vendors’ in-house hardware. In fact, internet access and subscription-based pricing are all the two have in common. A key differentiator of a true cloud application is that it’s built on multi-tenant architecture, which lends itself to a strong benefit for the enterprise: All customers benefit from the evolution required by the collective customer base.

Myth #7. Cloud Computing Imposes a Significant Performance Penalty over “bare metal” Solutions.

“I won’t let my users run a cloud computing application, because my users will not tolerate the performance hit,” has been a common misconception by IT departments, but is simply untrue. System response rates are in many respects superior to hardwired local area networks. The root causes of poor cloud computing application performance can be direct tied to either:
1. An application is performing poorly. This issue can typically be addressed by the application developers by tuning performance and making code corrections, or
2. An applications are performing poorly because of Internet problems.  This may be due to a poor Internet infrastructure which generally lies outside the control of any single company.

To make sure our applications are performing at maximum efficiency, our advanced code and user footprint , in addition to Electro Scan’s optimized configuration, maximum use of persistent connections, caching strategy, reduction in round trips to retrieve static content, and the pre-fetching of content, allows our applications to achieve the fastest response time possible.

Finally, Electro Scan’s reliance on cloud hosting services from publicly-traded Rackspace, occupying a dominant position in Gartner Magic Quantant, ensures our superior up time and dependability for mission critical decision making.