Dublin Airport Authority (daa)

daa is a global airport and travel retail group with businesses in 15 countries and employs approximately 3,000 people. It handled over 28M passengers in 2022 and is still recovering from the financial consequences of the 2020 COVID pandemic and these effects have placed sizeable constraints on operational expenditure.

Challenge

In common with most organisations, an increased workload has been placed on the workforce to safely manage operational systems whilst ensuring Health & Safety compliance, maximise financial performance and meet environmental, sustainability and governance (ESG) commitments.

Maintaining water management compliance standards was a constant challenge due to the:

Size of the airport campus and the volume of water lying in the vast network of piping, meant organic usage was incapable of creating a good movement of water, creating an increased risk of biological pathogen development (such as legionella, etc).
A manual process of water temperature data capture increased the risk of missing indicators of poor water health and possible compliance failure.
Additionally, the resolution of high levels of daily emergency call-outs (due to ageing pipework) took priority over required water health-related maintenance, which had to be contracted out to expensive external resources.
Business requirements to manage expenditure prudently, while maximising efficiencies.

Solution

The CreevX Smart Water Management system, originally fitted 24 months ago, and consisting of discreet wireless temperature sensors and flushing valves controlled by an AI-enhanced, cloud-based software allowed the collection of water temperature data every 15 minutes.

By continuously analysing this data, alerts can be issued for areas of concern. The flushing valves will execute remote flushing only when necessary to prevent the growth of legionella bacteria.

In addition to this, we are also co-innovating with Dublin airport to expand our technology to other areas such as air quality.

Results

The daa implementation has successfully delivered:

Automated legionella compliance and risk reduction – through continuous outlet temperature monitoring and water movement through our unique, remote intelligent flushing capability.

Improved sustainability credentials – through the reduction of unnecessary water flushing.

Significant cost savings/benefits – through reduced labour and contractor costs. Disinfection costs using copper-silver have been reduced by 95%.

Improved business resilience from the “reputational risk” catastrophe associated with legionella-related incidents.

Summary

In summary, water hygiene incidents, such as Legionella, could impact business resilience in the short, medium and long term and individual directors can be held legally liable and so not covered by insurance and warranties. Corporate water hygiene responsibilities, therefore, require board-level visibility and sponsorship to ensure damage of this magnitude to an organisation’s financial, customer and regulatory reputation and well-being is avoided.

Testimonials

Our knowledge about the health of our buildings and how they perform has grown considerably with CreevX and we have greater confidence that the improvements we made are being showcased in the building’s improved performance.