Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 12TH - 18TH OCTOBER 2018 | 21 Operations & Assets What the judges said… The judges felt this is an impressive project which provides benefits for many customers and stakeholders. They saw it as a valuable example of how IT can be used to bring genuine insight. decisions can be made quickly, ensur- ing eight to ten-week delivery targets are maintained. Impact assessments are completed for each delivery and, once approved, a delivery plan that highlights week by week the achievements, milestones and governance gates needed to deliver the solution on time. South West says the aim of this approach is to ensure it delivers a qual- ity product, returns value to its stake- holders early, and builds incremental value in its technical solution and the data stored within the data lake. What are the KPIs? South West says the solution compo- nents are: • Performance Modelling: Using pre- dictive analytics to pre-emptively trigger maintenance of assets • Risk Management Portal: An informative website which provides additional information to support decision making relating to the network • Pollution Insights Dashboard: Com- bines multiple network telemetry signals and smart logic to provide insight and early warning to opera- tors about the risk of pollution at a site • Wastewater Treatment Works Dashboard: A suite of dashboards providing detailed information about the process performance of works • Wastewater Operational Delivery Incentives Dashboard: A manage- ment level dashboard that con- tinuously measures performance against the three ODIs (a water industry KPI) agreed with Ofwat • Beach Live: A 90 per cent re- development of an existing sys- tem that provides bathing water quality information to the general public. The new system now fits with South West's cloud comput- ing strategy and provides a vastly improved service due to the crea- tion of a complex rules and logic engine • Gwithian Water Quality Partner- ship website. Currently available to external stakeholder organisations, this website provides information about a particularly sensitive river. SWW and Environment Agency monitors and sensors stream data into its cloud computing solution for analysis, which is then pre- sented on the website in a number of interactive charts and graphs How was creativity demonstrated? South West's Pollution Prevention solution comprises multiple compo- nents and has been designed to "max- imise value" from data that exists within its organisation. Historically this has been in silos or spreadsheets, which are manu- ally intensive to process, but its new solution enables it to stream millions of rows of data from monitors strate- gically located on its network to its cloud computing environment to form a "data lake" . This allows South West to con- nect with other data sources (such as weather), where it has the opportunity to transform, apply context and add logic to the data. The data is then used to feed its visualisation tools in the form of dynamic dashboards for inter- nal teams, and public-facing websites and mobile applications for its cus- tomers in applications that update in (near) real time. What was the impact? The company says it is committed to providing a "sustainable and effi- cient service" across its wastewater operations and has been working with Hitachi Consulting to ensure this is achieved. The partnership has been able to deliver innovative solutions to minimise the impact of operations on the environment, improve customer service and comply with regulations. Who was involved? Two key players in the initiative are IT delivery manager Natasha Grange and Toni Melia, programme manager. Were there any hurdles along the way? South West says a major hurdle in the Pollution Insights project was iden- tifying the correct iSCADA signals in the mass of data. To combat this, the IT team had to work closely with the business to pinpoint the appropriate measures. The logic engine for the new ver- sion of Beach Live was rewritten from the ground up. The team said handling the complexity of tidal movements against moving 15-minute windows was a "real challenge" for them. Winner's comments "This further demonstrates the value of IT-driven business intelligence to analyse our data in new ways, resulting in improvements to the services we provide to our customers and a reduced impact on the environment. "Our strategic partnership with Hitachi has allowed us to utilise the specific skills, knowledge and expertise in both organisations to deliver innovative solutions." TONI MELIA, PROGRAMME MANAGER, SOUTH WEST WATER "This award recognises the value of women in IT, as this initiative was led by women at project, programme, portfolio and account manager levels." NATASHA GRANGE, IT DELIVERY MANAGER, SOUTH WEST WATER South West Water on awards night

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