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Other case studies:
water solutions |
case study: Water
Water businesses in the UK are subject to a complex combination
of external pressures that create unique management challenges.
As public owned companies they are of course subject to the usual
commercial pressures associated with returns on investment, growth
and the stock markets view of their future potential. There product
has a low value and yet they need up to six times the capital value
of infrastructure that other utilities are able to work with. As
providers of clean water and managers of wastewater they have a
duty of care to both the general public and also the environment
and as virtual monopolies they are subject to control and regulation
by OFWAT, the industry regulator. This regulator sets targets for
capital and operating expenditure and customer service and also
limits prices.
Against this background of public service and regulation the water
businesses are constantly making value decisions about the value
of the asset base, the costs of maintaining and renewing it and
also the costs of operations.
Yorkshire Water decided to implement a means of measuring the performance
of its’ assets in order that they could be benchmarked against
each other, in this way identifying the least cost efficient and
targeting management action at improving the poorest performers.
In order to achieve a standard comparison across its’ business
Yorkshire needed to aggregate data from nine different data sources
relating to Assets. Operations, Electricity, Sludge, Leakage, Customer
contacts, Financial accounts, Work Management, Service Alarms and
up to 1200 tactical databases held in Lotus Notes. This data would
also need to be “normalised” in respect of variations
in operating environment so that like for like comparisons could
be made.
This data would then be processed through a series of complex calculations
and reports to:
- Show over or under performing assets as a ranked list
- Show historical data as a series of trends.
- Use trend data to predict future failure against targets
- Analyse results against proposed as well as agreed targets
- Create reports centrally for distribution to asset managers
to act upon.
- Summarise results at various levels of the asset hierarchy
- Capability to document next steps/action taken on each variance.
The APM analytics suite was selected to achieve this data integration,
analysis and reporting system and now processes up 14 million data
streams and undertakes 350,000 calculations every night.
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