WMLab: A web-based platform for Water Management data analysis

Royal HaskoningDHV’s Water Management team relies on detailed, accurate, and up-to-date hydrology data to model and understand the interaction of our clients’ water infrastructure projects with groundwater, surface water, and urban water.

The team recognised a need for scripts, spreadsheets, data sets, and models to be stored and managed centrally. This would ensure that essential information and workflows can be easily accessed by the Water Management experts who use them daily to help our clients.

But what form should the team’s new system take?

Designing a bespoke Water Management workplace tool

Tools for data management are essential for workplace productivity, but how do you ensure you get what you need? A commercial off-the-shelf solution might exist, but it probably won’t do everything you need and may be difficult to modify.

A group of Water Management experts (and coding enthusiasts) decided they were best placed to design and deliver the right tool. They identified the key characteristics of the end product, such as:

• It should use automation to reduce the time spent on tasks and free up more time to spend with clients.
• It should be easy to use, share, and access – not just by the Water Management team, but across the entire company.
• It should be up to date and maintained to avoid becoming riddled with errors and bugs.

With these outcomes in mind – and a shared passion for coding languages like Python and R – the team set about coding a bespoke workplace productivity tool for Water Management.

Introducing WMLab

WMLab is short for Water Management Laboratory. And, like the best real-world laboratories, it’s a place for people to collaborate on new ideas and work together to bring them to life.

The tool automates common workflows to speed through routine daily activities and deliver standardised outputs such as figures for reports, processed GIS data, or calculation sheets that the team can work on in Jupyter notebooks. Because WMLab is built around a web interface, users can easily access it wherever they’re working.

To share knowledge within the group, each workflow added to WMLab has a script developed by multiple coders. They are then reviewed by experts to ensure quality and, where beneficial, given an intuitive and easy-to-use graphical interface to facilitate work in a Jupyter notebook.

Crucially for the Water Management team, WMLab provides a powerful framework for handling large datasets. Via this option, the team has developed easy tools for downloading large open-source datasets such as land elevation data or performing automated postprocessing on modelling software, such as SOBEK, D-HYDRO, 3Di, Triwaco, iMOD, and MIKE+.

Improving the service for our clients

WMLab’s ability to gather data from different sources in one place – and generate workflows to use it – has created a powerful tool for our Water Management experts. But it hasn’t just optimised our internal processes – it’s also added significant value for our clients.

Although WMLab is an internal tool, when our clients provide data to incorporate into it, we can tailor the modelling to their situation. And, while work in WMLab takes place behind the scenes, clients benefit from more consistent, detailed reports because the same tooling is used across the team.

And greater automation brings additional benefits. By speeding up the time it takes to source, process and analyse data, WMLab gives our Water Management experts more time to spend with clients. That means we can gain deeper insights into the projects and provide more context to the solutions we recommend.

Royal HaskoningDHV: Blue-sky thinking in our DNA

The team that designed WMLab had the coding skills to deliver it, but it needed time to turn that vision into reality. Management encouraged them to develop the project independently, to provide the best tool for the users, and to share knowledge and skills at weekly coding and debugging sessions.

Although it’s not mandatory to use it, WMLab is now an important part of the onboarding process for new starters. The team is now spreading the word to Water Management groups around the world and other business units, such as Maritime and Climate Resilience.

At Royal HaskoningDHV, we value innovative, blue-sky thinking – and understand the positive results it can deliver for our clients and employees.

If you’d like to join one of our innovative teams – and help develop our next generation of workplace tools – check out our careers website for the latest opportunities.