SoutheastCon 2024 Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating a Municipal Water Quality Dashboard

At the Cary/A pex Water Treatment Facility in North Carolina, laboratory staff and sampling technicians perform over 100,000 water tests every year. This abundance of data is validated manually and analyzed with spreadsheets. This paper describes the process of designing, implementing, and evaluating a data visualization dashboard in PowerBI to help this water treatment facility effectively monitor the quality of the drinking water in their distribution system. The effectiveness of the dashboard was evaluated through surveys given to the project stakeholders. The feedback from these surveys showed that, overall, the users found the dashboard useful but would like to have real-time data updates.