Waterleau

Waterleau is a Belgian environmental group that designs, builds and operates water and wastewater treatment plants across the globe. Every basin and biogas installation produces a constant stream of process data. Ekinsol has led the technical side of the team that turns that data into products since 2019.

The challenge

Treatment plants never stop, and they stand everywhere from Flanders to far beyond Europe. An operator wants to know if the plant is healthy right now. A lab technician wants their measurements in the system without double entry. A plant manager wants to know what it all costs. They needed one platform for those questions, and it had to work with the PLC and SCADA systems already on site rather than replace them.

What we built

At the centre stands SmartLab®, Waterleau’s digital platform for process visualisation and KPI dashboarding. We lead its full-stack development. Lab measurements, sensor data and operational KPIs come together in dashboards that show in one glance whether a plant is healthy and what it costs to keep it that way.

Underneath runs an industrial data pipeline we architected, carrying live signals from the installations to the dashboards and the analytics platform. We also carried the platform through its biggest migration so far, from a single-instance legacy application to an architecture that scales horizontally and survives a region outage.

Deep dive: the stack

The platform pairs a .NET and Hasura API layer with Angular front ends on PostgreSQL. Plant signals travel over MQTT into Ignition and on to Databricks for analytics at scale. Infrastructure runs on Azure and is fully described in Terraform. The CI/CD pipelines we set up serve several development teams at once. Security gets the same weight as features, from NIS2 alignment to supporting the external audits a company like this goes through.

How we work

Ekinsol acts as technical lead of Waterleau’s digitalization team. We translate business requirements into functional and technical analysis, steer the architecture, and coach internal and external developers, including the IoT automation teams on site.

The next platform generation is being built spec-driven with AI agents in the loop. People own the planning and the review gates, agents execute against written specs, and every change lands traceably in the tracker. We use the same way of working on our own products. Here it runs at enterprise scale.

Where it stands

SmartLab® is a registered Waterleau product with its own public offering, and the platform keeps growing as new plants come online. After six years we know the installations almost as well as the process engineers do, which is exactly what long-term technical management should look like.