Discussion
Respond to the discussion post below with YOUR educated opinion in 3 sentences
A comprehensive Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) program is of major importance in the wastewater industry. Therefore, "Water treatment plants routinely record flow, raw water quality, chemical feed, turbidity and finished water quality data (O'Day, nd)" to assure safety and compliance. Most wastewater treatment plants use a Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system to continuously collect operations, equipment and laboratory data. The data obtained can be used for process improvements, identifying sensor malfunctions, and testing irregularities. Control charts produced from the collected data are used to monitor the stability of quality parameters by building trend lines in order to establish process averages and distinguish control limits; often upper and lower control limits within 3 standard deviations of the mean of a controlled process. These trends and patterns show process data over time and can help operators visually track performance to promptly spot systematic changes (O'Day, nd) and to select appropriate control actions.