Quellwerk — drinking water risk management

At most German water utilities, risk management for drinking water lives in Excel sheets, binders of lab PDFs, and the head of one person — usually the water master, who holds the role on top of their actual job. Measurement data from different labs is retyped by hand, working through the DVGW W 1001 checklists takes weeks per facility, and the formal risk assessment that every larger utility must submit to the health authority by January 2029 is either a looming backlog or an expensive consulting project.

Quellwerk is our answer for utilities between 2,000 and 50,000 connected residents: a tool that turns the water master into the risk manager instead of replacing them. The system drafts — extracted measurements, hazard suggestions, report documents — and a human reviews and approves every single entry. Deliberate constraint: limit checks and traffic-light logic are deterministic code, not a language model. Every approval is auditable; responsibility towards the authority stays with the utility.

Limits in view before they are exceeded

Every sampling point gets a traffic light against current — and future — legal limits. The interesting case is not the exceedance but the approach: for PFAS, the stricter 2028 limit is already in the system today, so a rising trend triggers a warning years before it becomes a compliance problem, with a forecast of when the line will be crossed.

From lab PDF to confirmed data series

Lab reports arrive as PDFs and get dragged in or forwarded by email. Quellwerk extracts sampling point, date, parameters, and values, maps them to the drinking water ordinance, and shows the result next to the original document for confirmation — including the line reference for every value. Unknown parameters become suggestions, never silent assumptions. Four pages of lab PDF become a confirmed data series in under a minute.

How the hazard analysis gets done

The W 1001 hazard analysis is a structured interview per facility. Quellwerk skips what it already knows from facility data, asks only the gaps, and links each answer with incident logs and measurement series. From that it drafts hazard entries with probability, impact, and existing controls — each with source references, each waiting for an explicit approve, edit, or reject. Weeks of checklist work become an afternoon.

Submission without assembly work

From the approved entries, Quellwerk generates the submission package for the health authority: report per W 1001, facility register, risk matrices, measurement evidence, and an append-only audit trail. A completeness check blocks submission while items are open, and a four-eyes approval is enforced before anything leaves the house.

Status

Quellwerk is a prototype. The screens above are the working design of the product we would build — nothing here is in production, and there are no customers yet. Whether we build it depends on whether the problem resonates with the people who have it: utilities, municipal associations, and the engineering offices that serve them.

If you run drinking water supply at this scale and recognize this workload, talk to us — your input decides whether Quellwerk gets built, and design partners shape what version one contains.