Custom software for pumping and distribution installations, drinking water production, water treatment and irrigation. Real-time telemetry from float, pressure, flow and quality sensors, integrated with your PLCs via OPC UA, Modbus or Profinet, with an operator layer designed around how your water teams work.
Water engineering is an umbrella term for everything that transports, treats or doses water: drinking water production and distribution at Vitens, Brabant Water, PWN, Evides, WMD and Waternet, municipal wastewater and sewage pumping stations, water boards managing regional water systems, industrial process water installations at food and chemical companies, cooling towers, swimming pool and recreational water, irrigation in horticulture and agriculture, and onboard water systems on ships.
Functionally, much of the software in this sector follows the same pattern: pumps, valves and frequency converters are controlled from the PLC, sensors deliver real-time data (floats, pressure gauges, flow meters, pH, conductivity, turbidity, free chlorine), and operators need to see that data at the right level — at the installation, in a central control room, or on a tablet on the move. On top of this sit alarm management, trending, recipe or setpoint management for different water quality targets, and compliance reporting to regulators.
In the Purdue reference model for industrial automation, a typical water installation is structured as follows: level 1 is the PLC with motor control and safety loops, level 2 is the local HMI at the station, level 3 is SCADA for supervisory monitoring across multiple sites and pumping wells, and level 4 is your information and compliance system (reporting to the ILT, water boards or Vitens quality management). We mainly build at levels 2, 3 and 4, the operator, supervisory and information layers, and connect via OPC UA, Modbus TCP, MQTT or Profinet to your PLCs and existing SCADA environment.
We build custom software when a standard SCADA package doesn't fit: because you want a single information layer across multiple PLC brands, because you want to give operators in the field a mobile HMI or control app, or because you need deep integrations with your maintenance system, energy monitoring or asset register. For maintenance on pumps and frequency converters, we often work with an integration into a CMMS maintenance system, and for energy consumption per pumping station or treatment stage, we link to energy monitoring.
Depending on where in the stack you need custom software: at the installation level, across your sites or stations, or as an information layer for compliance and management.
A web- or tablet-based control interface for a single installation: pumping or lift station, treatment line, drinking water pump or cooling tower. Real-time data from float switches, pressure gauges and flow meters, prioritised alarm handling, basic trends and operator login with role management. Suitable as a modernisation of an outdated proprietary HMI, or as an additional mobile layer alongside your existing SCADA.
A platform that brings dozens to hundreds of pumping wells, lift stations, pressure booster stations or treatment lines together in a single overview. A unified data layer via OPC UA and MQTT, push notifications for critical alarms, and role-based access per region or asset cluster. Operators and the on-call team can see what is happening on a phone or tablet, without being tied to a PC in the central control room.
A custom information layer on top of your existing Wonderware, WinCC, Ignition or FactoryTalk environment. Quality reports for the Drinking Water Act, BTO contributions, HACCP records for process water, integrations with asset registers and CMMS, and dashboards for management and regulators. Deep horizontal integration with ERP, GIS and maintenance systems.
When it comes to discharge rather than treatment, different standards and a different type of file apply. Our page on sewer management software with an inspection register covers this in more detail.
A production-ready water engineering layer, plus the documentation and integrations to manage and extend it yourself.
We do not replace Siemens WinCC, AVEVA/Wonderware System Platform, Inductive Automation Ignition or Rockwell FactoryTalk for enterprise SCADA on a large installation; they excel at that. However, custom software is worth considering in the situations below.
You may have Siemens PLCs at pumping stations alongside Rockwell on a treatment line, or Beckhoff on modern installations next to Wago or Schneider at older wells. A single vendor SCADA forces everything into their ecosystem. A custom software layer connects to all of them via OPC UA and gives your people one user interface.
On-call staff don't sit in a central room; they're out and about. A browser-based operator app works on tablet and phone, so you don't have to manage three different interfaces. Push notifications for overflows, critical low levels or overpressure land directly on the right device.
The software needs to push maintenance alerts to the CMMS, write quality data to the laboratory LIMS, and link energy consumption per station to your energy monitoring. That kind of horizontal integration isn't standard in vendor SCADA packages.
You need to demonstrably comply with the Dutch Drinking Water Act, meet BTO contributions, or keep HACCP records for process water in a food company. A custom information layer on top of your SCADA makes reporting traceable and repeatable without building spreadsheets by hand every month.
In recent years, OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) has also become the dominant way to communicate with a PLC in the water sector. It is vendor-neutral: an OPC UA client communicates just as well with a Siemens PLC as with a Rockwell, Beckhoff or Wago, provided the PLC publishes a UA server. For modern PLCs this is built in as standard; for older Modicon or Wago installations we build a gateway that translates Modbus TCP, Profinet or a manufacturer-specific protocol into OPC UA. For your information layer, that means one protocol, one tag model and one security layer, rather than maintaining six different PLC driver libraries.
For multi-site water installations, think of a water board with dozens of pumping stations, or a drinking water company with hundreds of distribution stations, we also work with MQTT as a publish/subscribe layer. MQTT is light on bandwidth (useful over 4G/LTE connections or legacy copper), keeps connections open from behind NAT, and lets multiple consumers listen to the same stream (operator app, multi-site dashboard, historian, lab integration) without each setting up its own connection to the PLC. At field level, Modbus TCP is still regularly needed for smaller sensor modules or legacy PLCs where OPC UA is overkill or not available.
The tech stack of a typical custom layer for water engineering looks like this: a web front end in React or Vue for the operator interface and multi-site dashboards, a Node.js or Python backend that handles PLC and SCADA communication and normalises data, a time-series database (InfluxDB or TimescaleDB) for historical trending of flow, pressure and quality, and WebSocket or Server-Sent Events for real-time push to the browser. For on-call staff and engineers, we often connect the information layer to an IoT app that shows the same data on a phone or tablet, with push notifications for overflows, level alarms, or a failed pump.
With OneDayBuild, we turn your idea into something tangible in one day for €1,150, so you can see whether further development is worth the investment. Decide to go ahead with the full build? Then we credit the full cost.
Explore OneDayBuild →The Dutch water engineering landscape relies largely on a handful of SCADA packages: AVEVA/Wonderware System Platform (formerly InTouch, widely used by water boards and drinking water companies), Siemens WinCC and WinCC OA (strong in industrial process water environments and larger treatment plants), Inductive Automation Ignition (vendor-neutral, web-based, growing in popularity), and Rockwell FactoryTalk View (on Allen-Bradley installations, more common in the food industry). These packages are mature, well documented and in many cases the right choice for the SCADA layer itself.
We deliberately do not replace those enterprise SCADA environments. Where we come in is the operator layer at the installation (close to the PLC), the mobile layer for on-call staff and engineers, and above all the information and compliance layer on top of SCADA. That layer differs slightly in every water organisation: your reporting requirements, your asset register, your maintenance process, your integration with ERP and GIS. Having a packaged SCADA also handle that information layer almost always leads to vendor lock-in, high per-user licence costs, and rigid reports that fail to keep pace with regulation.
A concrete example where custom work wins: you are a water board with around ten treatment plants running on Wonderware System Platform and hundreds of pumping stations on various PLCs with partly local telemetry. You want one dashboard that on-call staff, asset management and the board can all follow, with push notifications on overflow events and automated reports to Rijkswaterstaat and the province. We then tap into the Wonderware historian and the PLCs via OPC UA, normalise tags across the installations, and deliver a single web interface that works on the chair of the water board's phone. For industrial water installations, for example a food plant with HACCP requirements on CIP water, we work in a similar way: WinCC or FactoryTalk stays in place, and the compliance reporting sits on top of it.
If you manage drinking water installations at priority institutions, fixed requirements apply for Legionella prevention: a management plan, a logbook and semi-annual sampling. See Legionella management plan software.
If you work on the refrigerant circuit of cooling or climate installations, the F-gas Regulation applies and you work through a STEK-certified company. How to keep that logbook is covered in the STEK file.
A conversation in which we understand which installations you have, which PLC brands run on them, which SCADA you use and which compliance matters apply (Drinking Water Act, BTO, HACCP, EHEDG). Preferably we join you at a pumping station or treatment plant; seeing a pumping station from the inside tells us more than a diagram in the office.
We make an inventory of the OPC UA, Modbus or SCADA tags the software needs, and sketch the initial screen flow with your operator, process and asset engineers. At the end there is a scope, a schedule and a clickable prototype your people can test.
Every two weeks a working build that you can test on a staging PLC, a SCADA tap or a PLC simulator. Operators test along from the first sprint: an interface that looks good in the meeting may still prove awkward in the waiting room or on a tablet out in the field.
Phased go-live at one station or treatment plant, then rollout to the rest. Operator training, a short video tutorial and a runbook for your IT and OT team. Afterwards, ongoing management for security patches, PLC firmware changes and further development.
What clients in the water sector usually want to know before starting a custom project.
A thirty-minute introductory call, no obligation. We listen to your installation portfolio, your PLC and SCADA landscape and the on-call workflow, and give direction where it's useful to you. Often this is followed by a short walk-through at a station or treatment plant — nothing shows the real working environment better.
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