What Are the Key Sales KPIs for the Industrial Wastewater Treatment Equipment & Systems Industry in 2027?

Pipeline by project stage, in capacity and dollars

Industrial wastewater equipment is sold project by project, so the pipeline has to be counted two ways. Dollars say what the sale is worth. Design capacity, in million gallons per day (MGD) or gallons per day (GPD), says how big the plant is, and it lets you compare a clarifier job with a membrane bioreactor (MBR) job on a common scale.

• Pipeline by stage, in dollars. The sum of quoted contract value for every open project in a stage (lead, budget or study, pilot or treatability test, proposal issued, negotiation, award pending), reported stage by stage.
• Pipeline by stage, in capacity. The sum of design flow, in MGD or GPD, for the same open projects in each stage. Keep one unit for the whole report.
• Weighted pipeline. For each stage, pipeline dollars multiplied by that stage's historical close rate from your own records, summed over the stages. Do not borrow stage rates from another firm.
• Dollars per unit of capacity. Quoted value divided by design flow for the project, by technology (clarifier, DAF, MBR, ion exchange, chemical feed, zero liquid discharge). It shows which technologies are priced thin.
• Pipeline coverage. Weighted pipeline for the period divided by the bookings target for the same period.

• Public benchmark for pipeline by project stage (not published)None of the pages read for this page gives a company-reported or industry-wide figure for this KPI, so none is given.

Public companies do not publish stage-by-stage pipeline. What they publish is the later part of it, orders and backlog, which the book-to-bill section below uses.

Win rate on bids and RFPs

Win rate says how often a pursued project becomes your order. Count it by number and by dollars, because winning many small chemical feed jobs and losing the big ZLD (zero liquid discharge) system is not the same as the reverse.

• Win rate by count. Bids won divided by bids decided (won plus lost), as a percentage. Leave out bids still open and bids you chose not to submit.
• Win rate by dollars. Contract value won divided by contract value of all decided bids.
• Win rate on RFPs versus negotiated work. The same ratio split by how the project came to you: a formal public request for proposals, a competitive private bid, or a sole-source negotiation.
• Bid participation rate. Bids submitted divided by invitations received. A rising win rate with a falling participation rate may only mean you are bidding on safer work.

• Public benchmark for win rate on bids and RFPs (not published)None of the pages read for this page gives a company-reported or industry-wide figure for this KPI, so none is given.

Split win rate by end market and by technology. A firm that wins in food and beverage and loses in power should know that before it staffs the proposal team.

Spec position: designed in versus or-equal

In this industry, much of the sale is decided before the bid, when an engineer writes the specification. Being named in it changes the price you can hold.

• Spec position rate. Projects in which your product or process is written into the specification (sole-source or named basis of design) divided by all projects in the pipeline, as a percentage.
• Win rate by spec position. Win rate calculated separately for projects where you are the basis of design, projects where you are an approved equal, and projects where you are bidding against a spec written around a competitor.
• Price realization by spec position. Average quoted price divided by your standard list or budget price, split the same three ways.
• Engineer coverage. Consulting engineering firms with a current project that names you, divided by the engineering firms active in your target end markets.

• Public benchmark for spec position (not published)None of the pages read for this page gives a company-reported or industry-wide figure for this KPI, so none is given.

The test of the KPI is the gap: if win rate and price realization barely differ between designed-in and or-equal projects, the spec work is not paying, and the effort should move elsewhere.

Bid-to-award cycle time

Cycle time is how long capital sits in a project before it turns into an order. In a business with long project lead times it also tells you when the revenue will arrive.

• Bid-to-award cycle time. Median days from proposal submission to signed order or notice to proceed, for won projects. Use the median, since one stalled project can distort an average.
• Lead-to-award cycle time. Median days from the date a lead was qualified to the award date.
• Award-to-start slip. Days from award to the contract's planned start of engineering or shipment, compared with plan.
• Aged-bid share. Open bids older than your own median cycle time, divided by all open bids.

• Xylem, effect of timing on results (third quarter 2026 release, October 27, 2026)Xylem said revenue "was impacted by project timing and more cautious spending decisions" while order activity was strong. It did not publish a cycle time.

A stage that is lengthening before the quarter ends shows up here earlier than in revenue.

Backlog and book-to-bill

Backlog is signed work not yet delivered. Book-to-bill, orders divided by revenue, shows whether it is growing. Define both in writing, since public companies each define backlog their own way.

• Book-to-bill. Orders booked in the period divided by revenue recognized in the period. Above one, backlog is building; below one, it is shrinking.
• Backlog. Signed orders and contracts not yet recognized as revenue at period end, in dollars and in capacity (MGD or GPD).
• Backlog coverage. Backlog at period end divided by the next twelve months of planned revenue, which tells you how much of next year is already sold.
• Backlog conversion. Share of opening backlog recognized as revenue within the following year, compared with the plan you made.

• Xylem, backlog definition (annual report on Form 10-K for 2025, filed February 2026)"Backlog includes orders on hand as well as contractual customer agreements at the end of the period." Xylem reported total backlog of $4,615 million at December 31, 2025 and $5,070 million at December 31, 2024, and said it anticipated that approximately 60% of the backlog at December 31, 2025 would be recognized as revenue during 2026.
• Xylem, order definition (same annual report)"An order represents a legally enforceable, written document that includes the scope of work or services to be performed or equipment to be supplied to a customer."
• Xylem, third quarter 2026 (release dated October 27, 2026)Orders were $2,331 million with a book-to-bill of 106%. For the segment that includes industrial wastewater systems and services, Water Solutions and Services, orders were $650 million and book-to-bill 103%. For the nine months ended September 30, 2026, total orders were $7,645 million and book-to-bill 115%; Water Solutions and Services was $2,665 million and 145%.
• Kurita Water Industries, first six months of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2027 (release dated November 5, 2026)Consolidated orders for continuing operations were 359,587 million yen, an 81.8% increase year on year. Kurita said net sales for water treatment facilities in its Electronics Industry segment "increased due to sales from a backlog of orders."

Xylem's segment is wider than industrial wastewater, and Kurita's orders are led by electronics projects, so neither figure is an industry average. Use them to see how each company defines and reports the measure.

Aftermarket, service and consumables share of revenue

Equipment is sold once; service, spares, chemicals and membranes are sold again and again. The share of revenue that recurs is the most watched quality measure of a company in this field.

• Aftermarket share. Revenue from service contracts, spare parts, retrofits and upgrades divided by total revenue, as a percentage.
• Consumables share. Revenue from membranes, resins, filter media, polymers and treatment chemicals divided by total revenue.
• Recurring share. Contracted service and consumables revenue (multi-year or auto-renewing) divided by total revenue. Count only what is contracted, so that a good quarter of one-off spares does not inflate it.
• Contract renewal rate. Service contracts renewed divided by contracts reaching term in the period, by count and by dollars.

• Xylem, how it defines service revenue (annual report on Form 10-K for 2025)"Service revenue is primarily related to outsourced water services, maintenance, repair, preventive and inspection services, software as a service ("SaaS") subscriptions, and spare parts sales related to these service offerings." Xylem says it is "dedicated to building high-margin, recurring revenue."
• Xylem, Water Solutions and Services, 2025 (same annual report)Segment revenue rose 5.2% to $2,464 million. Organic growth was $117 million, led by service growth of $62 million; growth from capital and other applications was $55 million. Xylem acquired Evoqua in 2023 (the 10-K refers to "the 2023 acquisition of Evoqua"), and its site lists Evoqua services under its own brands, so Evoqua no longer reports separately.
• Kurita, revenue lines (release dated November 5, 2026)Kurita reports orders and net sales for water treatment facilities, maintenance, recurring contract-based services and water treatment chemicals. In General Industry for the first six months of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2027, it said orders for maintenance and recurring contract-based services rose and net sales for water treatment chemicals rose; it gave no share of revenue.

Neither company gives a stand-alone aftermarket percentage in the pages read, so the formula above has to be measured from your own ledger.

Installed-base attach rate

Every plant you build is a future service customer. Attach rate measures how many of them you actually serve.

• Service attach rate. Installed systems under an active service or spares agreement divided by installed systems in the field, as a percentage.
• Consumables attach rate. Installed systems that buy their membranes, resins or chemicals from you divided by installed systems that use those items.
• First-year attach. Systems commissioned in the last twelve months that signed a service agreement within that time divided by systems commissioned in the period.
• Revenue per installed system. Annual aftermarket revenue divided by the number of installed systems, by technology and by age of the system.

• Public benchmark for installed-base attach rate (not published)None of the pages read for this page gives a company-reported or industry-wide figure for this KPI, so none is given.

The hard part is the denominator. Keep a current installed-base register (site, technology, commissioning date, who services it), or the rate cannot be computed at all.

Gross margin by project versus aftermarket

Project work and aftermarket work earn different margins, and a blended margin hides the mix. Report them apart.

• Project gross margin. (Project revenue minus project cost of goods sold, including engineering, fabrication, freight and commissioning) divided by project revenue.
• Aftermarket gross margin. (Service, spares and consumables revenue minus their cost of goods sold) divided by that revenue.
• Margin fade. Margin at award, on the bid estimate, minus margin at completion on actual cost, for each project. A persistent fade means bids are priced from optimistic estimates.
• Mix effect. Change in blended margin that comes from the shift in aftermarket share rather than from a change in either margin.

• Xylem, consolidated gross margin, 2025 (annual report on Form 10-K for 2025)Gross margin as a percentage of consolidated revenue rose 100 basis points to 38.5% in 2025, compared with 37.5% in 2024. The report does not split it between project and aftermarket work.
• Kurita, definition of business profit (release dated November 5, 2026)Kurita calls business profit its "own indicator that measures constant business performance," defined as "net sales less cost of sales and selling, general and administrative expenses." For the first six months of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2027, it recorded a provision for loss on a large water treatment facilities project for the electronics industry in the United States, and its Electronics Industry business profit was negative 5,967 million yen. General Industry business profit was 12,259 million yen, up 4.9%.

Kurita's result is a clear reminder of margin fade: a large project, priced before its design and local certification costs were known, turned into a loss provision.

Customer concentration by end market

Two kinds of concentration matter here: how much revenue sits with a few customers, and how much sits in a few end markets that rise and fall together. The end markets in this field include food and beverage, chemicals, power, mining and oil and gas.

• Top-customer share. Revenue from the largest customer, and from the largest ten, divided by total revenue.
• End-market share. Revenue (and weighted pipeline) in each end market divided by total, reported for food and beverage, chemicals, power, mining, oil and gas, and all others.
• End-market win rate. The win-rate formula above, run for each end market.
• Herfindahl index of end markets. The sum of the squared end-market shares. The lower the sum, the more spread the book.

• Xylem, customer concentration (annual report on Form 10-K for 2025)Xylem said its business is not dependent on any single customer or a few customers, and that no individual customer accounted for more than 5% of consolidated revenues in 2025, 2024 or 2023. It describes industrial verticals for its Water Solutions and Services segment: "life sciences, microelectronics, food and beverage, chemical processing and power generation."
• Kurita, end-market reporting (release dated November 5, 2026)Kurita reports two segments. For the first six months of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2027, Electronics Industry orders were 231,300 million yen, up 194.3%, and General Industry orders were 128,287 million yen, up 7.6%. Kurita attributed the electronics increase to investment in semiconductor plants.

These show the practice: a major supplier states the customer ceiling and the end-market split it reports. None of the pages read gave figures for mining or oil and gas customers, so those shares have to come from your own book.

Regulatory-driven demand pipeline

Much industrial wastewater spending is not discretionary. A discharge permit, a pretreatment standard or an effluent guideline sets a limit, and a plant that cannot meet it has to buy treatment.

• Regulation-driven pipeline share. Pipeline dollars (and MGD) on projects with a stated compliance trigger, such as a new or reissued permit limit, a consent order or a new standard, divided by total pipeline.
• Compliance-date coverage. Regulation-driven projects with a compliance deadline in the next twelve months that you have already quoted, divided by all such projects you know of among target customers.
• Trigger-to-award lag. Median days from the trigger date (permit issued, rule effective) to award, by regulation.
• Permit watch list. Number of target customers whose discharge permits come up for reissue in the coming year, kept by name.

• eCFR, 40 CFR 122.44 (current as of November 5, 2026)The National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit rule says each permit "shall include conditions meeting the following requirements when applicable," beginning with technology-based effluent limitations and standards. Section 122.1 says the NPDES program is implemented under sections 318, 402 and 405 of the Clean Water Act.
• eCFR, 40 CFR 403.1 (current as of November 5, 2026)The general pretreatment regulations establish "National Pretreatment Standards to control pollutants which pass through or interfere with treatment processes in Publicly Owned Treatment Works," which bears on plants that discharge to a municipal sewer.
• eCFR, industry effluent guideline parts read (current as of November 5, 2026)Part 432 covers meat and poultry processing, part 423 steam electric power generation, part 435 oil and gas extraction, part 440 ore mining and dressing, and part 414 organic chemicals, plastics and synthetic fibers. Each says to whom it applies in its first section.
• Federal Register, steam electric power generating (published May 9, 2024)EPA finalized revised limits for flue gas desulfurization wastewater, bottom ash transport water and legacy wastewater, and for combustion residual leachate, estimated to cost an additional $536 million to $1.1 billion annually in social costs.
• Federal Register, meat and poultry products (published September 3, 2025)EPA withdrew its proposed rule of January 23, 2024 and said it had decided not to finalize revised limits or pretreatment standards for the industry.
• Federal Register, Preliminary Effluent Guidelines Program Plan 16 (published December 18, 2024)The notice states that the Clean Water Act requires EPA to publish a plan for new and revised effluent guidelines and pretreatment standards every two years, after public review and comment.

Read together, the rules show why this KPI needs a date on every regulation: one rule was finalized (steam electric) and one was withdrawn (meat and poultry), and demand moves with that.

Data that could not be read

The brief for this page asked for official sources only, and none may be replaced by an estimate. These could not be read, and no figure from them is used.

• Veolia, Pentair and Ecolab investor pages. The Veolia website, the Pentair investor site and the Ecolab investor site each returned a 403 error to requests with no user agent, and the SEC filing host did the same, so this page stopped requesting from each. No Veolia Water Technologies, Pentair or Ecolab water segment figure is quoted. Aquatech was not read.
• EPA. The EPA website returned a 403 error, so the EPA program pages on effluent guidelines and NPDES permitting were not read. The regulatory facts above come from the eCFR and the Federal Register instead, which are federal government sources.
• U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics, NAICS 333318. The Census data service asked for an access key and the BLS pages were not requested. No industry revenue, payroll or employment figure is quoted.

A scorecard to start with

One row per KPI, with who watches it and how often. Targets come from your own history, since no industry average was found.

• Weekly, sales lead. Pipeline by stage in dollars and MGD, aged-bid share, open bids by spec position.
• Monthly, regional sales and applications. Win rate by count and dollars, bid-to-award cycle time, end-market share, regulation-driven pipeline share.
• Quarterly, finance and service. Book-to-bill, backlog and backlog coverage, aftermarket and consumables share, attach rate, project and aftermarket gross margin, top-customer share.

Questions people ask

Sources

• Xylem: Xylem Reports Third Quarter 2026 Results and Announces Strategic Actions to Accelerate Growth, October 27, 2026 · Orders, book-to-bill by segment, project timing comment
• Xylem: Annual Report on Form 10-K for 2025, filed February 2026 · Backlog and order definitions, service revenue definition, customer concentration, gross margin, Evoqua acquisition
• Kurita Water Industries: Consolidated Financial Results for the Second Quarter of the Fiscal Year Ending March 31, 2027 (IFRS), November 5, 2026 · Orders and net sales by segment, business profit definition, large project loss provision
• eCFR: 40 CFR parts 122, 403, 414, 423, 432, 435 and 440, current as of November 5, 2026 · NPDES permit conditions, pretreatment standards and industry effluent guideline applicability
• Federal Register: Supplemental Effluent Limitations Guidelines and Standards for the Steam Electric Power Generating Point Source Category, May 9, 2024 · Finalized steam electric limits and estimated cost
• Federal Register: Meat and Poultry Products point source category, withdrawal of proposed rule, September 3, 2025 · Withdrawn proposal
• Federal Register: Preliminary Effluent Guidelines Program Plan 16, December 18, 2024 · Biennial effluent guidelines planning requirement
• Library of Congress, Carol M. Highsmith Archive: Aerial view of Milwaukee Water Works, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (LC-DIG-highsm-40013), no known restrictions on publication · Hero photograph (a drinking-water treatment plant, shown as a treatment-plant image). Credit line: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Figures were read on November 8, 2026 from the company and government pages linked above, for the periods stated. The KPI formulas are working definitions, not published standards. Not read: Veolia, Pentair and Ecolab investor pages and the SEC filing host, the EPA website, and the Census and BLS pages for NAICS 333318, because each blocked requests made with no user agent or required a key, and this page stopped requesting from each host. This page is not financial advice.