Environmental

Brought collection-site context into every result and report

A municipal water-testing district · 8 employees · ~900 samples/mo across 27 sites

Published

A municipal water district was managing 27 collection sites across four separate systems — IDs in one place, chain-of-custody forms in another, regulatory limits in a printed binder. Consolidating into Aliquora cut OOS notification time from 24 hours to minutes.

Challenge

Sample IDs, collection coordinates, and chain-of-custody forms lived in four separate places. Reporting against site-specific limits required cross-referencing a printed binder. State regulators asked for OOS notifications faster than the team could compile them.

What they set up

Created sites as a custom material attribute. Imported the regulatory limit table per site/parameter. Configured email notifications for OOS results to the compliance officer in real time.

Results

24 hrs → minutes

OOS notification latency

−80%

Annual report compilation

27

Sites tracked in one system

"We used to find out about an exceedance the next morning. Now the compliance officer gets the email before the technician finishes the next sample."

— Operations Lead (composite, based on early-access feedback)

Implementation timeline

How the transition unfolded week by week.

  1. 1

    Site inventory and limit mapping

    Week 1

    Catalogued all 27 collection sites with GPS coordinates, site codes, and sampling frequency. Digitized the regulatory limit table — 14 parameters × 27 sites — from the printed binder into a CSV. Found three sites where the binder had outdated limits; those were corrected before import.

  2. 2

    Custom attribute setup

    Week 2

    Modeled each collection site as a custom material attribute on the sample record so that every result is tied to its site automatically at log time. This replaced the manual cross-reference step that technicians previously did by comparing sample IDs to a lookup table.

  3. 3

    Regulatory limit import

    Day 10

    Imported the per-site, per-parameter limit table. Aliquora applies the correct limits at result entry based on the site attribute — no manual lookup, no binder consultation. The compliance officer reviewed the first 50 results post-import and confirmed the system was applying the right thresholds.

  4. 4

    OOS notification configuration

    Week 2

    Configured email alerts for any result flagged OOS, routed to the compliance officer and the operations lead. Tested with a synthetic OOS result; the email arrived in under 90 seconds of result entry. This replaced the morning-batch review process that had previously introduced up to 24 hours of notification lag.

  5. 5

    Annual report workflow

    Ongoing

    The first annual report compiled after cutover took two hours instead of the previous two and a half days. The team exports a filtered result set by site, parameter, and date range; the structured data maps directly to the state agency's reporting template.

What they'd do the same — and differently

Practical takeaways from the rollout.

  • Audit your printed reference materials before importing. The three outdated limits in the binder would have been invisible errors if they'd been imported unchecked — and a compliance miss downstream.

  • Real-time OOS notification changes team behavior quickly. Within the first two weeks, technicians started double-checking borderline readings before submitting, because they knew the compliance officer would see the flag immediately.

  • Modeling sites as a structured attribute (not a freeform text field) pays off at report time. Filtering 900 samples per month by site, parameter, and date is instant; it would have been hours of spreadsheet work before.

  • The annual report time savings compounds across years. Each year's data is already in the system, structured and filterable. The second annual report will take less than an hour.

See how it works for Environmental Testing

Environmental Testing — features & workflow

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