Since 1947, Hach Company has manufactured and distributed analytical instruments, test kits, and reagents for testing the quality of water and aqueous solutions, with products for lab, process, and field. Our products are designed specifically for quality, accuracy, and simplicity, and today are in use around the world.

Hach U.S. Facilities
Our Loveland, Colorado (USA) facility houses our corporate headquarters, research and development laboratories, and instrument manufacturing operations. A plastics division and the Hach Technical Training Center are also based in Loveland facilities. Over 500 of our employees work in Loveland.

Employees at our facility in Ames, Iowa (USA) manufacture and package all our chemical reagents and test kits, and fill customer orders from our main warehouse there. Advanced electronic information systems help us to pick, pack, and ship hundreds of orders throughout the world every day. About 300 Hach employees work at Ames.

Future
Strengthened by our sister companies in the environmental industry worldwide, our goal for the future is to continue to provide customers with reliable instrumentation, accurately prepared reagents, proven methods, simplified procedures, and outstanding technical support. Our commitment to quality and continuous improvement, as evidenced by our ISO 9001 Certification, will help us continue to create products that meet our customers' changing needs.

Since 1984, OPS Systems has been providing software solutions for analysis of the wastewater and water treatment process. With a current suite of software applications that includes Hach WIMS™, Hach WIMS OnDemand™, Hach JobCal®, and Hach Aspen, OPS Systems provides strategic data management, preventive maintenance, and laboratory information management software solutions for water, wastewater, and energy plant operations.

As a software-only company, our goal is to be responsive to our clients' needs and to keep pace with the latest in technological developments. OPS Systems is dedicated to understanding the needs of operators, analysts, technicians, and senior management in order to bring fully integrated solutions for their data management needs. Headquartered in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, this central location allows our organization to be easily accessible for our coast-to-coast customers. In addition, we now have access to the Hach global sales and service channels.

Since 2001, WaterEye has been allowing users to remotely manage their water treatment facilities with near realtime availability of their plant operating data. The WaterEye remote monitoring products grew out of our work as system integrators and software developers for the ultra pure water (UPW) industry. These UPW systems use reverse osmosis, ion exchange, micro-filtration and disinfection processes on a regular basis. Our original idea was to provide operational support services to large ultra-pure water users, primarily in the semiconductor and power industries. To do this required that operating information be extracted from the process controllers and manipulated mathematically to "normalize" performance back to standard or startup conditions. With current operations compared to standard or nameplate conditions, reasonable assumptions about the health and maintenance of the system could be made. A semiconductor facility costs in the order billions, and the water treatment plant a few million. Since small aberrations in water quality can greatly impact chip or disc drive yield we believed that facility managers tasked with improving yield would enjoy such a technology offering. Key to making this program feasible was developing a means to extract data from the control systems and network of a very expensive, very secretive facility without having ANY possibility or suggestion that we or others using our channel if inadvertently left open that we could affect the controls of the primary facility. Thus was born the idea of WaterEye.

In 1998, Internet connectivity was by no means ubiquitous and even domain name ownership was not well understood. In that time the primary method for remote monitoring at far distances outside of a corporate or government WAN involved "polling", whereby the local computer collected data at regular intervals and uploaded this data when requested by an incoming request. The incoming request was normally mediated by a phone call, but TCP/IP requests were also beginning to appear. The idea we had was to make the local computer fully autonomous, meaning that it sent data without any requests being forwarded to it. We further improved on this by having the local computer send its data to a database. Once the information was in the database, it was relatively straightforward to develop web pages that utilized this data.

We had never seen anyone do data collection like this so we decided to apply for a patent in the latter part of 1998. On September 11, 2001 (yes that is correct) the patent office mailed out our notice of allowance for our first patent - 6332110. WaterEye now has several issued patents and others pending.

Today, WaterEye has evolved into a highly reliable remote monitoring system, secure enough to be located within refineries, power stations and complex manufacturing facilities such as semiconductor fabs. Industrial and municipal water and wastewater treatment plant operators rely on WaterEye to provide the primary alarms and alert functions when they are not physically present on site. Municipal plants not only use WaterEye for alarm functions but to generate state and federally mandated water quality and discharge reports. For desalination systems, WaterEye provides near real time calculations to normalize data back to baseline conditions, allowing operators to assess the health of the membranes and resins on an ongoing basis. Of course WaterEye technology is not limited to water or wastewater operations and can be used for a wide variety of monitoring purposes in a wide variety of applications.