Coastal Water Quality Management System
Beach water samples for bacteria must stay cold and be processed within hours, but monitoring programs run on tight staff and budgets. Results often reach the public a day or more late, after people have already been in the water. Testing also shows where water is unsafe but not why, so pollution sources like storm drains, runoff, or sewage overflows go unaddressed
The 5-Star Process
Map the current workflow, timing each step from sample collection to transport, lab testing, data entry, and public posting.
Find the bottlenecks, such as long transport times, manual data entry, or lab runs that wait for full batches.
Redesign the physical workflow with a cold-storage sampling kit, an optimized collection route, and a lab station layout that cuts processing time.
Link results to sources by overlaying water quality data with rainfall and storm drain locations to identify likely pollution hotspots.
Design a public alert system, a simple beach status page and notifications, tested with beachgoers and staff.
The Outcome.
Faster public alerts: sample-to-result time cut from 18 hours to 15 hours
More efficient operations: 14% less staff time per sample
Pollution sources identified: 3 hotspots flagged to the city for repair
Safer beaches: people can decide where to swim based on current, trustworthy data!