The City of San Francisco, through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
(SFPUC), provides drinking water for the City plus 33 additional, separately permitted
water agencies and municipalities in five counties in the Bay Area. City of San Francisco
has specialized environmental laboratories providing full analytical and field studies
services in drinking water, wastewater, sediments and solid wastes, limnology, marine
biology, and microbiology. Traditionally, the departments they supported managed
them and operated separate laboratories. In 1997, the laboratories and associated
support services, such as sample collection, were consolidated under the single agency
of Water Quality Bureau (WQB), to centralize operations, remove redundancies and
improve services. Management structure was altered to create a single Laboratory
Director to oversee all laboratory operations. As a natural extension of this concept, a
Client Services section was created in 2000.
Client services provides a single point of contact and "one stop shopping" to meet the
varied analytical needs of regional water system customers as well as those of other City
agencies, whether they can be met by City laboratories and field teams or through
commercial laboratories. The concept of a specialized client services group is relatively
new to laboratory staff as well as the clients. This paper discusses how the client services team is shaping the overall goals of WQB, its role in expanding laboratory
services, the benefits to customers and clients, and current practices and future
direction.
| Edition : | Vol. - No. |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 180 KB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Published : | 11/01/2002 |
