Transcend Design Generator’s Living Master Plan Gives Utilities Resilience

After twelve months of collaborating with your consulting engineer, you’ve finished your utility’s master plan. Relief. Then, right as it’s behind you, your town is chosen as one of the best places to live in the country. The population boom voids your new master plan. Your staff, management, and town hall are tense as budgets shuffle and the process starts again. You can’t help but wonder, “There has to be a better way.”

Enter the Transcend Design Generator (TDG). This software acts as a living master plan and conceptual design platform that considers your utility’s entire system, making comprehensive changes when individual metrics shift. Unforeseen growth? Change the population inputs in TDG and it’ll revise your entire master plan to reflect it. What used to take months can now be accomplished in a week, revise the risk of time-consuming backtracking. TDG streamlines the master planning process, offering a platform that generates and shares master plan progress. With a utility’s data and objectives, consultants can review TDG’s many design options, offering the utility multiple paths forward. Plus, the platform’s organizational features simplify project management.

For example, TDG transformed the a 24MGD WRRF capital planning process, where the utility struggled with stricter effluent limits colliding with high-power weather events and population growth. The utility needed to consider alternative technologies that could address their future constraints. But time and money restricted their considerations. After learning how TDG could empower consultants to offer 30 scenarios instead of three, they amended their RFP. Transcend gave technical support to the bidding consultants and the utility received ten times the options for their master plan. No change to the timeline or budget. After reviewing the options and choosing a consultant, they could move on to cutting-edge designs they previously couldn’t consider.

As planning moves to design, TDG can generate submittal quality 30% complete Plans from files already in your living master plan on the TDG platform. These Plans generate in anywhere from minutes to a few hour, depending on the complexity of the plant. Once submitted by your consultant, a path forward into detailed design may initially appear appealing until a greater level of information about the site acquired through detailed design informs the project team of a need for revisions.

Fortunately revisions are quickly performed by modifying the Plan in the TDG platform, and in a matter of minutes a user canupdate parameters and let TDG complete another design, nullifying any project delays.  Your local regulators may also have concerns and questions about your project, requiring your team to adjust. By changing the TDG inputs in question, your revised 30% Plans are ready for resubmittal in one workday. With a living master plan, it’s that simple.

After planning, designing, and investing in capital infrastructure, your utility may need to file a rate case. Your filing requires your capital expenses to be sound decisions, ones that were chosen over other options before investing your ratepayers’ and shareholders’ money. Following your master planning objectives and demands, TDG generates an unlimited set of options & designst doesn’t only give you new ideas; it proves your utility considered every option before spending capital. As an added benefit, living master plans help your utility plan and predict rate increases, reducing the risk of surprising your ratepayers with rate hikes.

Running a utility has unpredictable demands. TDG gives you the resilience to plan despite them. Try TDG for free before your next master planning cycle and let Transcend transform your utility’s treatment assets.