July 2014, EBC has entered into a contract with the research company ABF Research in Delft, The Netherlands, to renew the existing benchmarking tools.
EBC started with regular benchmarking exercises in 2007. At that time, EBC re-used existing tools from the Dutch association Vewin and added a module to enable data submission via the internet. Although the benchmarking tools succesfully supported the past seven exercises, today the platform is technologically outdated, had reached limitations in terms of number of participants and is not able to run parallel exercises. Also, it requires too much resources to produce reports. Therefore, EBC has decided to completely renew the tools.
After a careful selection process, ABF Research company has been chosen by EBC Foundation to support its benchmarking activities with new tools and a new website. The renewal project will last until Q1 2015 and targets at using the new benchmarking tooling for the next IB2015 benchmarking exercise as well as the parallel exercises in the Danube region.
The first visible step (December 2014) will be to replace the existing website www.waterbenchmark.org by a new one, which will serve as a portal to public information as well as to the secured platforms for the different benchmarking exercises.