The critical moment in time for North American water utilities to unlock operational efficiencies

Water utilities across North America face a daunting challenge: they need hundreds of billions of dollars for infrastructure upgrades over the next decade, but funding sources are falling short.

To close this funding gap, utilities must identify and capitalize on opportunities to streamline existing systems and processes. This will unlock valuable budget and resources that can then be redirected to much-needed infrastructure upgrade projects critical to long-term, sustainable operations.

The road to today's funding gap

The mismatch between infrastructure demands and available funding is the result of years of compounding factors.

Water utilities operate in a high-stakes environment where service interruptions and water quality issues carry immediate safety, regulatory, and reputational consequences. As a result, budgets have historically been absorbed by urgent needs — leak response, main breaks, and emergency repairs — leaving fewer resources for proactive, long-term maintenance.

Severe weather events intensify this problem. Flooding, drought, and freeze events damage infrastructure and trigger unplanned repair costs, stretching operating budgets even further. That pressure has forced utilities to defer planned maintenance and critical capital projects.

The longer these critical projects are postponed, the more expensive they become. Between 2020 and 2025, supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, and inflation drove material and construction costs up by 45%.

Over time, the cycle of deferral has led to aging, overstressed infrastructure that threatens service reliability and regulatory compliance — precisely when performance standards are at their highest. Water safety incidents have prompted regulators to tighten quality standards, resulting in stricter testing, documentation, and reporting obligations. Yet, successfully meeting compliance requirements doesn't solve the underlying problem: the need for more capital and resources to address underlying infrastructure upgrade and modernization requirements.

While some utilities are seeking incremental funding from private and public sources, investors and constituents don't have the appetite to fully fund the entirety of the required infrastructure upgrades.

Raising water rates, the other funding alternative, also comes with obstacles. Every rate increase requires approval from local jurisdictions, which is already a time-consuming process, and can be derailed entirely by community pushback.

All these constraints make one thing clear: utilities cannot rely on external funding sources alone. Instead, they must unlock incremental investment capacity from within their existing operations.

Where operational efficiency gains are hiding

The next challenge is knowing where to look. The most significant operational efficiency gains typically come from eliminating manual, repetitive work — especially in areas where small bottlenecks drive outsized costs, risks, or service impact.

Examples of such opportunities include:

Leakage management

Aging infrastructure and more frequent weather events are driving up the number and severity of leaks, overwhelming teams and stretching repair timelines. As these delays grow, field capacity hits a ceiling, costs escalate, and the customer experience suffers — pushing performance closer to regulatory thresholds and potentially triggering penalties.

Understanding where leaks occur, how often, and how they are resolved transforms how utilities respond. With that clarity, teams can prioritize the right work, prevent repeat incidents, and accelerate repairs, spending less time on redundant fixes and emergency calls. Ultimately, they turn a chronic source of cost and customer frustration into an operational strength.

Permit management

Permit management is plagued by constant inbox monitoring, sprawling spreadsheets, and repetitive data entry across systems. These manual processes drain staff capacity and extend approval timelines, driving up costs as crews wait instead of working.

Centralizing permit management with standardized data, automated workflows, and direct connections to public systems of record creates a clear, real-time view of what’s pending, who is responsible, and what needs to happen next. Field crews can handle permits, upload documentation, and respond to requests on the spot, eliminating the need to apply resources to chase public record updates and conduct project impact assessments. In turn, approvals move faster, project resource allocation is optimized, and compliance becomes more manageable, even as regulatory requirements shift.

Asset alert triage management

Triaging alerts from remote monitoring systems requires piecing together context: checking for duplicates, confirming whether a work order exists, and searching for related outage information. This manual effort consumes hours, yet response times and outcomes rarely improve.

Alerts that automatically link to relevant SCADA, ERP, and asset records give teams all the necessary context for action. Teams can move from detection to resolution in a single, connected flow, with clear ownership and next steps enabling faster, more targeted responses. The time saved goes toward higher-value work, like diagnosing root causes and implementing reliability improvements that prevent future incidents.

Environmental compliance

Manually gathering, collating, and packaging evidence from multiple systems for environmental compliance creates gaps and inconsistencies. A single gap — a missing environmental assessment, an overlooked test result, or an expired permit — can trigger a domino effect of penalties, rework, and administrative costs.

When evidence from ERPs, CRMs, and Field Operations systems is automatically assembled into audit-ready packages, the administrative burden disappears. Teams easily generate incident summaries and supporting documentation — including captioned photos and telemetry charts — freeing up time for risk management. To support their work, evidence can be validated throughout the workflow, catching errors before submission and preventing compliance failures.

Cogna closes the funding gap with purpose-built automation

Cogna creates purpose-built applications that deliver the operational efficiencies needed to unlock internal investment capacity. Through its AI-powered software factory, Cogna converts fragmented processes into tailored automation that frees up capital and streamlines compliance.

By working directly with operations teams, Cogna designs and builds turnkey, outcome-driven solutions that suit the unique constraints of water utilities. Every application integrates seamlessly with existing ERP, SCADA, asset management, and customer platforms, ensuring operational continuity without disruptions or extensive IT lift.

With this foundation, the software orchestrates intuitive, multi-step workflows that drive efficiency gains without overwhelming users. Teams are productive from day one, accelerating improvement and fostering high-impact collaboration.

Cogna's model also ensures this value translates to measurable results, as utilities pay only after the solution is live and delivering the agreed operational outcomes. Support and iterations are included in the original package, fully de-risking adoption while keeping pace with evolving regulations, assets, and processes.

Ready to turn manual workflows into operational capital? Book a demo.