Transforming a large wastewater contractor’s profitability through performance improvement

A large contractor for one of the UK’s biggest water and wastewater utilities commissioned Enzen to improve its financial performance through improved service delivery.

Working across more than 50,000km of sewer network that services in excess of two million residential consumers, Enzen’s customer is responsible for all the utility’s reactive and smaller repair works, CCTV surveys and sewer-lining activities.

As part of its five-year contract, the customer completes over 75,000 reactive jobs and around 20,000 civil excavation jobs a year for the utility. With a view to continuing the contract through the next regulatory cycle, the customer challenged Enzen to not just improve customer satisfaction and profitability, but expand the range of services it could offer as a contractor.

To answer the challenge, Enzen marshalled a team of highly-experienced operational excellence consultants which specialised in utility transformation. From planning and scheduling experts to systems developers and performance analysts, the Enzen knowledge practitioners collaborated to deliver a series of innovative services and solutions.

Using a combination of operational excellence and digital intelligence, the team developed a strategy based on people empowerment and instilling a culture of continuous improvement. Tactics deployed included:

• Refining business processes to remove waste and non-value adding activities
• Improving employee engagement
• Sharing a new vision of ‘what good looks like’
• Better planning and managing, from the centre and within field teams
• Getting the right team on the right activity at the right time
• Improving performance reporting to enable better decision-making
• Utilising technology to reduce waiting and handling times
• Improving communication with remote field teams.

Thanks to Enzen’s support, the contractor is now delivering better commercial performance, improved profitability and has regained confidence with the utility organisation. Specific outcomes included:

• Creating positive momentum thanks to better reporting systems and a new delivery and growth plan, which removed a feeling of reactive ‘firefighting’ among the contractor’s workforce
• Development of cloud-based active planning system to effectively assign labour and plant resources to field activities
• Reducing operational costs by 29% to improve profitability
• Increasing customer satisfaction by 18%
• Reducing sewer flooding incidents and highways disruption through better planned re-instatement works
• Protecting the environment by avoiding unnecessary travel and excavations.