Predictive Maintenance Platform for Water Infrastructure
About the Client Organizations
The Technology Client was the R&D innovation lab of one of the world's largest global technology and professional services consultancies — a firm that routinely partners with NGOs and governments to apply emerging technology to humanitarian challenges.
The End Beneficiary was a globally recognized nonprofit whose singular mission is bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in the developing world. The organization is widely known for its transparency, accountability, and direct-impact model — tracking every dollar donated to a specific water project in a specific community. At the time of this engagement, the nonprofit had funded thousands of water projects across dozens of countries in Africa, Asia, and Central America, providing access to clean water for millions of people.
The Problem
In remote communities across the developing world, hand-dug wells and mechanical water pumps are the primary — often only — source of clean drinking water. When a pump fails, the impact is immediate and severe: families revert to contaminated water sources, children miss school to haul water from long distances, and the health consequences compound quickly.
The painful reality was that pump failures were largely reactive. A pump would break. The community would lose water. A report would eventually reach a field coordinator. A service provider would be dispatched — sometimes weeks later. The water would eventually return. But the damage — to health, to daily life, to the mission — had already been done.
The pumps, however, were already equipped with IoT sensors continuously monitoring water flow and pressure. The data was there. What didn't exist was a platform that could interpret that sensor data intelligently — identifying early warning patterns before a failure occurred — and give field managers the tools to act on it proactively.
The Solution
The R&D lab engaged Impekable to design the human-facing layer of a predictive maintenance platform: the web-based tool that a non-technical field manager would actually use to monitor pump health, understand risk signals, and optimize maintenance dispatch before pumps failed.
Impekable's work spanned two phases:
Discovery & Definition Working from the R&D team's demo story and sensor data model, Impekable ran a rapid two-week discovery sprint. The team aligned stakeholders on priorities, defined the critical user journey for a field manager overseeing a distributed pump fleet, and scoped the features for the platform. This phase gave the engineering team clear architectural direction and gave Impekable a precise design brief.
UX/UI Design & Prototype Impekable designed a full web-based fleet management dashboard, including:
Pump fleet overview — a manager's dashboard surfacing the real-time status of all pumps in a region, with health indicators derived from sensor data
At-risk pump identification — a predictive view highlighting which pumps were flagged as likely to fail, with the underlying signals driving the alert
Maintenance scheduling tool — an interface for building and optimizing dispatch schedules for field service providers, prioritized by risk level and geography
Wireframes → high-fidelity designs → clickable prototype — a complete, presentation-ready deliverable the client could use internally and with stakeholders
Impekable also contributed at the strategic level — helping the R&D team refine the demo narrative and prioritize which capabilities belonged in the initial phase versus a planned second phase.
Results
Impekable delivered a complete design system and clickable prototype within the 11-week engagement. The client reported that the team effectively translated complex sensor data and operational workflows into a clear, usable interface. The designs were used to present the solution to the consultancy's internal management team and to the nonprofit client, where the concept received strong positive feedback. A second design phase was planned as a result.
