Origins
The FlowWorks web platform has its origins in Kerr Wood Leidal Associate’s flow monitoring and analysis work dating back to the 1980s. KWL is a Canadian consulting engineering firm established in 1975 to provide municipal infrastructure and resource management services to government, industry and First Nations clients.
KWL built its name on its staff of flow monitoring engineers and other experts in data collection, measurement and analysis. As early as 1987, KWL engineers were performing QA/QC and data summary calculations on primitive VisiCalc spreadsheets. By 1995, the KWL engineering team had developed numerous in-house tools using sophisticated spreadsheets and Visual Basic programs to automate large portions of flow monitoring analysis. These valuable tools were being used by clients by 1997, who quickly came to understand the benefits of their predictive capabilities.
Birth
In 2005, in response to ever-louder requests from clients, KWL began in earnest to develop its system of spreadsheets and programs into the FlowWorks we know today: an integrated, affordable, real-time web-based data collection system combined with powerful engineering analysis tools. Typical uses include analyses for water and wastewater conveyance and treatment, drainage and creek system monitoring, rainfall and climate stations, and industrial applications. This system, originally called KWL Emerald, won the 2007 Consulting Engineers of British Columbia’s Award of Merit.
Expansion
In June 2009, a new and dramatically improved version of KWL Emerald was launched under the name of FlowWorks, and included the first-ever web-based tools to perform mathematical calculations on real-time data – tools that would eventually form the basis of FlowWorks Advanced Calculation Engine (FACE). The FlowWorks technology was sold to a Washington State corporation in the spring of 2010, a move that would spur rapid adoption of the platform worldwide. Today, FlowWorks head office is in Seattle and the company operates a technical center in Vancouver, Canada and data servers in the United States, Canada, and soon in the United Kingdom.
FlowWorks continues to develop its web platform for gathering, analyzing and understanding all forms of environmental monitoring data based on user input. FACE: FlowWorks Advanced Calculation Engine was released in July of 2011 giving users direct access to sophisticated data calculation tools for real-time data analysis. In the Fall of 2011, FlowWorks released a complete new suite of graphical editing QA/QC tools. All part of the power of FlowWorks.
In October 2015, FlowWorks was acquired by Carl Data Solutions to become the latest addition to a suite of powerful enterprise applications focused on Big Data as a Service (BDaaS). The acquisition provides FlowWorks with access to a larger group of application developers and data science experts that will result in more advanced custom features and faster new version releases. Additional product enhancements are also available with the support of Carl’s team of UX/UI designers, technical writers and product development experts. By migrating FlowWorks data storage and analysis to Carl’s cloud-based platform, machine learning and deep analytics can be applied to our customers’ data to solve their challenges in new and powerful ways. The explosive growth of data created by the Industrial Internet of Things will produce obstacles and opportunities in data management and analytics. FlowWorks continues to be an industry leader in innovation by helping our customers make better use of this data by providing actionable insights to support smart business decisions.
