Transforming the efficiency and operations of a large water utility

To improve efficiency and centralise its ways of working, a large UK water and wastewater company with seven million customers undertook a huge transformation programme across its organisation.

Involving 2,000 employees, 30,000 assets, 96 water treatment works, 1,800 pumping stations and 566 waste water treatment works, the programme was designed to improve infrastructure performance, enable better planning of work and ensure all maintenance work was done ‘right first time’.

When the incumbent partner failed to meet its programme objectives, the customer commissioned Enzen to help complete the project successfully. Within five weeks, 26 Enzen consultants joined the programme and set about delivering enhanced enterprise asset management with new scheduling and mobile solutions.

As part of its solution, the Enzen team focused on improving mobile capability for field staff and developing a single asset register so there was ‘one version of the truth’ within the business. Other objectives were to establish more effective scheduling and create cyclical maintenance procedures. More specifically, Enzen’s solution entailed:

• a proactive redesign of the existing Asset Management solution
• a centralised inventory management of spare parts
• enabling a mobile solution to capture data in near real-time
• on demand access for field workers so they have visibility of asset data such as attributes, maintenance history, location, CAD drawings and photos
• support to other workstreams including data migration, reporting and supply chain.

Another fundamental part of the solution was a Reliability-Centred Maintenance (RCM) toolkit. Developed in SAP, the RCM was a competely customised solution designed to interface with other solutions and deliver more accurate maintenance forecasts. By generating better insights into how assets are performing, the RCM enabled the customer to be much more proactive, transitioning it from a pattern of reactive to predictive maintenance.

Finally, the Enzen team added value over and above the original scope by regular knowledge and experience sharing, delivered through different forums exclusively organised for the client. These included a day-long innovation event for programme sponsors and other business leaders, plus a series of best practice sessions to share learnings from business change, engagement, mobile and scheduling programmes elsewhere.

Thanks to Enzen’s intervention, the transformation programme created a single view of operational assets across the business. The customer was now able to centralise all scheduling and dispatch across its water and waste water networks and therefore deliver more efficient work profiling and prioritisation. Other positive outcomes included:

• an incident ratio of 4% (compared to a previous best of 35% for similar programmes in the customer’s organisation)
• a partner KPI evaluation score consistently in excess of 120%
• a sustainable reduction in the cost of maintenance engineering, resulting in lower consumer bills
• a more intelligence-led, proactive maintenance regime, which meant less unplanned outages and a more reliable service to customers
• a reduction in the amount of senior management time spent on the project
• improved compliance with regulatory requirements
• increased productivity and utilisation time of field operatives.

Testimonials from the customer’s team included:

• “I have heard only good feedback about the Enzen team and your quality of work. You did a cracking job with a responsive mobilisation of the core team, working very closely with us throughout the process. You are consistently delivering to a high quality, doing what you say you will, and doing it very well. You are now our go-to partner when we are faced with any challenges.”
• “It has been a perfect marriage with a competent partner, with a better quality of delivery. I wanted to congratulate you on your progress, and let you know that this is working very well. Keep up the good work!”
• “Nothing is too difficult with you guys. We are a lot more productive with your team around to support. You are flexible and proactive in delivering the solution, with a strong client and customer focus.”
• “It feels like we are one team. I have stopped reviewing your work as the quality is always good!”