The Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District (MSD) serves 1.3M users over 520 square miles and has the 4th largest sewer system in the United States. The current system includes 9,600 miles wastewater, stormwater and combined collection sewers, 278 pumping stations, and seven wastewater treatment facilities that treat an average daily flow of 350 MGD. In 2011, MSD entered into a consent order with the US EPA requiring MSD to spend a minimum of $4.7B over the next 23 years to address the issue of overflows and other sewer system improvements. In 2018, the EPA released a guidance document, “Smart Data Infrastructure for Wet Weather Control and Decision Support” that featured case studies from many programs saving 100-200 million USD with a digital transformation of their utility. As this report and other similar studies were issued, MSD began talking about smart technology and how it can be used to improve operational performance. In 2019, MSD embarked on an initiative with a team of representatives from Engineering, Operations, and IT to create a Wet Weather Optimization Program Charter with a Purpose, Vision, and Goals. This initiative is included in the 2021-2025 Strategic Business and Operating Plan. The major goals are to reduce overflows to the environment thereby improving water quality in the region, reduce the costs of capital program to meet regulatory commitments, and improve level of services for customers (reduce basement backups). MSD is embarking on a journey down a path of operational analytics with the purpose of implementing wet weather control technology for cost savings, operational efficiencies, and system optimization. The ultimate vision of this program is to use real-time data and regional control strategies to optimize performance of the entire wastewater and stormwater system during wet weather. Goals of this program stem well beyond reducing capital expenditures and creating sophisticated dashboards. MSD envisions a new way of managing its complex wet weather infrastructure; one that leverages data and technology to augment and elevate staff capabilities, achieving an integrated, coordinated control of wet weather events – with simplicity in mind. To successfully implement this program, MSD needs organizational buy-in and participation from all stakeholders and leans heavy on planning, operations, IT engagement. This program was able to get off the ground and running in late 2020 by closely watching what other communities were proactively doing to implement their own digital transformations. MSD decided it was time to redefine what smart water means to the organization and hopes that this presentation helps other utilities define their future smart water goals. The foundation of the program is built on three main principals in mind – transparency, simplicity, and incremental progress and is ever evolving as we dive deeper into program development. One critical task in this program includes a small scale pilot study to demonstrate program benefits while identifying challenges and the processes/solutions to overcome them. Lessons learned will support the broader goal of implementing a watershed wide real time decision support system. The Pilot Study was kicked off at the onset of the program in early 2021, in tandem with program tasks, to build momentum needed for program continuity. We will share where we are at today in the process and where we ultimately want to be 5+ years from now. We’ll dive deep into our last 2 years of progress on the program including modeling evaluation and conversion, the Optimization process and the Pilot Study and the Digital Twin.