Founded in 1945, Johnson County Wastewater (JCW) – situated in the southwest suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri – is charged with treating wastewater for one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States. JCW currently operates six wastewater treatment facilities that serve 500,000 Johnson County residents across 17 cities. In total, Johnson County has 2,300 miles of sanitary sewer lines that direct 60 to 65 million gallons of daily flows to JCW’s treatment facilities.
To keep up with Johnson County’s rapid growth, JCW has begun leveraging digital design tools that have streamlined its workflows and enabled it to provide wastewater treatment services at high levels.
The role that technology has played in improving JCW’s operations and infrastructure projects was on display during a recent session at Autodesk University 2023. During the event, Black & Veatch’s Brian Melton and JCW’s Jose Leon Jr. came together to discuss the different solutions and programs JCW has adopted to digitally transform the monitoring, operations, engineering, and maintenance of Johnson County’s wastewater treatment facilities.
For Leon, providing high-performing utility services is all about continuous improvement. “One of the things that we take pride in at JCW is finding ways to continuously stay ahead of the curve, push the ball forward, and think about the future of our work,” Leon said. “And with that comes innovation.” He explained that today’s digital design solutions enable JCW to understand and visualize its data in ways that could never have been imagined 10 or 20 years ago.
“The days of utilizing paper and pen to do daily tasks around our facilities have either come to an end or are coming to an end quickly.” — Jose Leon Jr.
Modern design tools that JCW has employed have enhanced collaborative workflows between its operations and maintenance teams, as well as with its engineering teams in the private sector. “The days of utilizing paper and pen to do daily tasks around our facilities have either come to an end or are coming to an end quickly,” explained Leon. “This is because technology is filling in these needs for us more and more.”
Leon discussed how JCW completed the reconstruction of its Tomahawk Creek Wastewater Facility in 2018 and is currently undertaking the reconstruction of its Nelson Complex Wastewater Facility, which is expected to be completed in 2030. Leon explained that there were plenty of lessons learned during the Tomahawk project, especially through its use of digital design solutions. Those experiences, Leon said, are being leveraged in the design and construction process for the Nelson Complex.
During the design process for the Nelson Complex project, JCW’s engineering team used Autodesk Revit to create a model for asset management and operations. “All of the data was essentially created in Revit,” explained Melton. “That includes the process plant piping, in addition to the structures. Then Civil 3D was used for the surface and buried utilities. Also, this was one of the first projects where we actually deployed the Autodesk Construction Cloud at scale with BIM 360.”
“Innovation continues as projects happen over time.” — Brian Melton
Melton said that JCW also deployed UNIFI for the Nelson Complex project’s content management workflows. “This project ended up having about 60+ Revit files across the two organizations that built this, and around 1,600 factual drawings that were produced,” he said.
Leon and Melton both highlighted that most of the design tools that have been deployed throughout the Nelson Complex project are the same ones used during the Tomahawk Creek reconstruction, though there have been a few changes to JCW’s processes due to lessons learned from the earlier project.
“Through those projects, we’ve changed our philosophy on how information was separated,” said Melton. “Previously, we might have come from an area where there were discipline-specific Revit files. Now, we generally are more open to collaboration and more comfortable with the technology and the cloud solutions, so we have a single file per structure with multiple people working on it at the same time.” He explained that with their new workflows, structural, mechanical, and electrical teams can all simultaneously work in the same Revit files.
“We changed our philosophy…That’s the sort of innovation that we have on our side to help free up some data and manage projects a little bit more effectively.” — Brian Melton
“Innovation continues as projects happen over time,” said Melton. “We changed our philosophy…That’s the sort of innovation that we have on our side to help free up some data and manage projects a little bit more effectively.”
Another modernized design solution that JCW has embraced is the digital twin. According to Melton, JCW has been using data to create a real-time, virtual counterpart of its facilities’ physical assets, systems, and processes. Digital twins can be used to simulate and predict operational outcomes that can inform decision-making. They are also key to monitoring asset performance and indicating when system maintenance is required. But for Melton, one of the most important functions of digital twins at JCW is being able to locate physical assets quickly.
“Early on we spent a portion of time locating valves for maintenance professionals,” said Melton. “They were new to the site and couldn’t find them. This creates downtime and costs for both parties…This [digital twin] metamodel can just simply show the location of our assets.”
Though the completion of the Nelson Complex Wastewater Facility is still seven years away, Melton and Leon both agree that realizing all the benefits digital design tools can provide to the wastewater facility lifecycle is an ongoing and evolving process. As the Nelson Complex reconstruction continues to unfold, they intend to keep innovating and improving their digital workflows and carry all lessons learned forward into future projects.
To watch this Autodesk University session in its entirety and learn more about Johnson County Wastewater’s Nelson Complex reconstruction project, click HERE.
