Tetra Tech Digital Systems migrated the City of Huntington Beach from a legacy Wonderware SCADA system to a standardized VTScada platform, reducing maintenance costs and improving operational consistency.
The City of Huntington Beach owns and operates the water utility and wastewater collection system serving approximately 200,000 residents. It includes 27 sewer lift stations, 10 wells, 5 reservoirs, and 16 flood stations. Their Wonderware-based SCADA system had grown through multiple integrators over the years, leaving inconsistent programming styles, no standard structure, and accumulated workarounds that made troubleshooting and expanding the system increasingly difficult and costly. The City sought a standardized replacement to reduce ongoing costs.
Our engineers selected VTScada through a comparative evaluation and managed the transition from Wonderware using an agile development model. Biweekly in-person meetings enabled just-in-time decision-making and gave the City direct involvement in codeveloping the solution throughout the project.
Our team established strong standards for pumps, valves, and transmitters before templatizing entire sites after extensively reverse engineering to classify the existing screens, tags, and alarms. We ran VTScada in parallel with the existing system for nearly six months, giving operators training time before full cutover. Once the City confirmed the templates, we took a templatized approach to all 16 flood stations that delivered consistent operations and reduced annual costs for future commissioning. Each flood station used a single shared template, reducing commissioning time after the flood station went online.
Benefits
- Template strategy completed site rollouts in hours
- Parallel operation provided nearly six months of operator training
- Single template commissioned 16 flood stations consistently
