OPERATIONAL MANAGEMENT
Water companies need to integrate operations
Improved operational efficiencies should remove the need for customer contact, says Graham Hainsworth, lead water sector consultant at Logica UK, and this will help water companies meet their operations budgets
W
here are the opportunities for water companies to improve their operational performance in AMP5? The final price determination lays down a major operational efficiency
challenge for water companies by granting significantly lower operational budgets than were requested in their business plans. The new Service Incentive Mechanism (SIM) is just one example that will
act to drive new customer service improvements. So how can companies make these service and performance improvements whilst meeting their operational performance in AMP5? Logica believes a large part of the answer lies in Integrated Operational Management (IOM). Over recent years companies have made significant performance improvements and operational efficiencies by optimising processes in different areas – managing customers, assets, work, plant processes. However, the gains here are beginning to diminish. Similarly, over many years companies have invested heavily in telemetry technology to monitor and control plant and networks. These systems serve their intended function well, however this is often in an isolated manner. By exploiting the value offered by real-time information and integrating this to optimise processes across the different dimensions, Logica believes that companies can go a long way to meeting the challenges of AMP5.
Customer contact Companies are always looking at ways of improving customer service, and the new SIM will bring customer service and customer satisfaction into sharp focus. This objective now needs to be on removing the need for customer contact in the first instance through a more integrated approach to operational management, and a more proactive response to service issues. Great work management improvements have also been made by adopting overarching management techniques, mobile working technology and automated scheduling. Tackling this area in isolation allows a company to make sure it does things efficiently, but greater benefits are attainable by reducing the amount of work that needs to be done. In terms of plant and operational management, a significant improvement can be made by centralising operations with all telemetry input co-ordinated through control centres. If the full picture is available to controllers it allows for immediate and more informed responses. Additionally it can be used to reduce the need for resources at the many
remote sites. Further to this, if a degree of automation is introduced this again can reduce staffing and can lead to a faster, pre-emptive response to problems. But can water companies take this advantage further into their business enterprise? Asset planning is often seen as an isolated area. It requires a wealth of knowledge about assets, how they are performing, their condition and their failure risk. With that knowledge it is possible to build a risk based investment plan to focus the limited capital budget on those schemes that deliver the best outcomes. The challenge then becomes one of delivering the capital programme and its outcome in the AMP period.
Contact coordination Close co-ordination of customer contacts reporting service issues and the
24 Water & Wastewater Treatment September 2010
management of that work allows agents to provide more informed responses to customers. A customer contact history can be built up over time and allows an agent to handle calls appropriately and identify a more systemic problem that may require a longer term asset upgrade to fix. At one level this allows the call agent to handle that call differently, but it also helps identify a more systemic problem that may require a longer term asset upgrade to fix. All of these features give a much better chance of being able to deal with the customer’s problem in the first contact and hence maximise SIM scores. Linking customers, assets and work delivers a step change in performance. The systematic logging of work recorded against the asset and spatially, provides a much better picture of how the assets are performing. It also records the cost impact of these failures and remedial work, and therefore better quality knowledge to feed into the asset investment planning processes. Furthermore, this information on asset performance and failure trends, particularly if combined with actual load and condition data from the real-time systems, allows more informed maintenance strategies to be developed. This enables companies to move towards pre-emptive, condition-based asset maintenance regimes. Bringing the real-time view of plant operations and telemetered events
into a wider operational domain allows companies to provide pre-emptive responses to problems as they develop. This co-ordination has the potential to allow companies to warn customers of potential impacts before they report the issues themselves.
Building capability Building an IOM capability such as this provides the greatest opportunity for a water company to deliver the step change in performance and operational efficiency that AMP5 demands. The key to success is to exploit the value provided by the real-time systems, integrate these more widely through your company and use this unlock value in the different areas of your business. It will allow companies to be more pre-emptive in their operations; to have a more complete view of asset performance resulting in fewer service failures and reduced maintenance cost; and it allows for proactive warnings to customers, improving customer satisfaction scores. ■■■
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