South East Water transforms water quality management with EnviroSys

Melbourne-based water utility provider strengthens compliance and operational efficiency with EnviroSys

South East Water delivers safe, high-quality drinking water and manages wastewater disposal for 1.8 million customers across Melbourne’s southeast region.

In 2025, South East Water delivered 146 billion litres of drinking water and treated 148 billion litres of wastewater across a service area spanning 3640 km² and 270km of coastline.

To ensure the safety of its customers, South East Water must follow stringent regulatory reporting requirements for their monitoring programs and publish these results publicly under the Safe Drinking Water Act 2003, the Safe Drinking Water Regulations 2025 and Australian Drinking Water Guidelines 2011.

To adhere to these regulations, South East Water is required to take water quality samples in line with their monitoring programs covering the 40 localities and 68 water storage facilities, with each distribution zone within a Water Sampling Area having its own schedule and water parameters.

An audit of South East Water’s risk assessment plan in 2023, by the Department of Health, flagged the water quality management system it was using at the time as a reliability risk due to limited internal support and maintenance available for the critical business system.

This prompted Anthea McManemin, Water Quality Manager and Nicholas Rangas, Project Manager to seek out a secure, supported and scalable environmental data management solution to help the water quality team collate and monitor their programs.

Managing thousands of samples across a highly distributed water network

South East Water schedules and collects thousands of samples annually from its network of customer properties, water storages, and large mains. In 2025, the team collected 13,500 samples, testing for more than 50 parameters such as E. coli, turbidity, chemicals and microbials in the water, to understand water quality across the network. Each parameter also has its own exceedance limits which are closely monitored, with alerts needing to be triggered whenever thresholds are exceeded.

The water quality team at South East Water is responsible for scheduling and monitoring programs, data collection, data analysis and emergency response management of the entire water quality network.

Anthea McManemin explains, “We have a mountain of data and a lot of complexity to it. We have sample taps within distribution zones; distribution zones within Water Sampling Areas and Water Sampling Areas supplied by different source waters. Each Water Sampling Area has its own schedule for each parameter that needs to be tracked as part of our Regulatory requirements, and then we do our own internal risk assessments to identify other parameters that need to be monitored or trended, plus additional parameters that might not be a risk for water quality, but our customers want to know those results. So, there’s a lot of complexity to the scheduling and naming and tracking, and we’re heavily reliant on the accuracy of our data.”

A modern solution to tackle water quality alerts through to automation

For more than 20 years, the South East Water team relied on a custom-built MS Access database to manage their data. After identifying the system risk, South East Water sought out a new solution that could provide a single source of truth and:

• automate the scheduling and monitoring program for thousands of sample taps
• provide data validation and cleansing at the point of entry
• generate automated alerts for exceedances and missing samples
• automate importing laboratory results and invoice reconciliation
• provide the South East Water team the autonomy and flexibility to maintain the software internally.

“In the previous database, there were not many notifications or alerts. Users had to go in there and manually track and confirm data. In a new solution, we saw this as an opportunity to also find a solution that could alert us to when samples are not correct or exceeding limits, or equally as important, if samples are missed”, begins Anthea.

But the South East Water team recognised this was not a simple task.

“There’s a lot of complexity even just to understanding the data and setting alerts. Each parameter has its own exceedance limits on it. We needed early warning limits that will send a notification, as well as any failure notifications. Each limit is based on a calculation, such as turbidity must be in the 95th percentile. We also track chlorine through our water storages, so each storage has its own limits. For one storage, it may be one milligram per litre coming out of the tank, whereas another might only have 0.2 milligrams coming out – but you need to know as soon as either of them slightly drop from their usual levels,” shares Anthea.

The water quality team completely transitioned to EnviroSys to manage their water quality monitoring programs in 2025.

A flexible solution to support South East Water’s water quality operations

With EnviroSys in place, South East Water consolidates its complex water quality operations into a single, secure, supported system.

EnviroSys has enabled the South East Water team to automate the scheduling and monitoring of thousands of sample taps across their network, eliminating the manual effort the previous database required.

As Anthea explains, “EnviroSys is being used to automatically cleanse and validate the data, check for missing sample tap codes or other information, and alerting us to exceedances in near-real time. These checks are happening all in the background.”

South East Water is also using EnviroSys to streamline their laboratory processes, with results imported directly into EnviroSys, making it simple to check results and easier to match and reconcile samples and invoices from the lab.

For Anthea, being able to adjust scheduling and how information is displayed in EnviroSys was also a major benefit to ensuring the solution reflected South East Water’s operational and regulatory needs.

“Having the flexibility with our exceedance management was an important component for us. In EnviroSys, our team can tailor the exceedances and set different limits based on different parameters and different sites. There’s a lot of flexibility for us to self-manage our programs in EnviroSys, that we didn’t have previously.”

EnviroSys also integrates seamlessly with South East Water’s Power BI dashboards, giving the team more visibility of scheduling and business reporting across the network.

Partnering for a smooth transition

The South East Water and acQuire’s EnviroSys teams worked closely through discovery sessions to validate and understand the business needs of the water quality team.

Workshops ensured requirements were clearly defined at the outset and regular reviews throughout the implementation phase allowed the water quality team to provide feedback and ensure the solution aligned with their operational needs.

Comprehensive support and knowledge-sharing by acQuire, also helped South East Water transition smoothly from a 20-year-old system to a modern platform.

Nicholas acknowledged the transition could have been daunting: “Naturally, you’re not going to feel confident and comfortable… you need that support level. But Daniel Woodcock and Nigel Gregg from acQuire’s EnviroSys team were there the whole way to guide us through that tricky time.”

Throughout testing, onboarding and go-live, acQuire’s responsiveness became a defining part of the project’s success. “The team was so responsive. The communication was really great. To have a success like this one, you need everyone to come together and that’s exactly what happened in this implementation,” shared Nicholas.

This hands-on support also extended to day-to-day use. Whenever staff encountered challenges, help was immediate. Anthea shared, “Any time the water quality team was playing around with the system and saying, ‘I’m stuck here,’ there was always someone jumping in to support.”

Putting water quality data in everyone’s hands

EnviroSys now feeds near real-time water quality data directly into South East Water’s public-facing Water Quality Checker and internal Locate Us tool. Both platforms play an important role in the transparency, compliance and customer service of the water quality network.

The Water Quality Checker displays the most recent test results from sample taps across South East Water’s network, typically published within 24 hours of being received. It provides a rolling 12-month summary for each Water Sampling Area and individual sample tap, showing compliance against the Safe Drinking Water Regulations and the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines 2011.

“The website is more for our customers… they can see a locality-level or down to sample tap-level. It’s a regulatory requirement to make our data publicly available. Victoria doesn’t dictate the format, but we choose to make it an interactive and user-friendly experience,” shared Anthea.

Similarly, the EnviroSys solution supplies data to Locate Us, South East Water’s mapping-based tool used internally by field teams to respond to customer enquiries. With real-time data being fed into this tool and displayed visually on a map, the field teams can quickly identify nearby sample taps and review the latest results, ensuring fast, informed responses.

Together, these tools rely on EnviroSys as their authoritative data source, ensuring everyone that relies on or reports on South East Water’s water networks have access to accurate, timely and trusted water quality information.

Want to find out how EnviroSys can help your business?

Regardless of the scale of your organisation, monitoring the environment can be a multi-disciplinary venture. If you’d like to learn more about how EnviroSys can help your business manage its water quality or any environmental data, and answer the question, “am I compliant right now?”, get in touch with acQuire.

In short

Company: South East Water

Industry: Water utility

The Challenge:

• Managing thousands of water quality samples across a complex and highly distributed network
• Tracking and reporting multiple parameters, exceedances, and schedules
• Transitioning from a 20-year-old legacy system to a modern, supported platform
• Ensuring regulatory compliance while maintaining operational flexibility

The Results:

• Consolidated water quality operations into a single, secure source of truth
• Automated scheduling, monitoring, and alerts for thousands of sample taps
• Streamlined laboratory result imports and invoice reconciliation
• Enhanced flexibility to tailor exceedance management and reporting