WET News

ALLIANCES 2019 7 ALLIANCES 2019: ANGLIAN WATER Anglian Water, Kier and Clancy Docwra are three key partners in the Integrated Maintenance and Repair (IMR) Water alliance contract. IMR Water completes the water company's infrastruc- ture maintenance work, being responsible for water network pressure management, finding and fixing leaks, lead replacement and repairing burst water mains. The alliance has around 800 employees and was founded in 2015 with a 15-year contract, consisting of three five-year terms. Performance criteria are assessed annually with the opportunity to feed back and review. Dave Ward, director of the IMR alliance, told an audience at Utility Week Live earlier in the year that the key to integrating the alliance team – many of whom had worked under previous models – was training, with all the alliance's people training together with no differentiation, investment in Integrated Maintenance and Repair (IMR) Water Recycling is made up from Anglian Water, Kier, Clancy Docwra, Claret Civil Engineering, Danaher & Walsh and Public Sewer Services and manages the contract for proactive and emergency sewer repairs. They also have packages of work for sewer and rising main repairs, manhole and chamber refurbishment and replacement, interceptor removal flooding mitigation and dealing with both public leadership training, and the physical co-location of employees in open-plan offices. He said the alliance set out to offer "long-term, stable jobs, with trust and good personal relationships," and that this was appreciated by the workforce. Despite these factors pulling everyone in favour of integration, he stressed that the commercial model has to be right before the rest of it can happen, and that having a single Totex budget for the alliance has helped greatly in simplifying financial and transferred assets. As with its sister IMR alliance, which looks a˜er the water network, IMR water recycling has adopted a 'best for task' philosophy where each partner can nominate individuals to fill roles and vacancies, and a collective decision is made about who is best for the task. Jim Davey, associate director of Clancy Docwra, says that the beauty of the long-term nature of the Anglian alliances is that it concerns and incentives in the alliance. Jim Davey, associate director of Clancy Docwra for the Anglian Water Alliances, says that there is a lot of work now going on to establish how the alliances will adapt and develop its work in the light of Anglian's PR19 business plan. "Effectively what we are doing is looking at our existing alliance relationships and commercial models and seeing how we can develop them further. Can we do more, can we become even more collaborative? "We know there is going to be a huge challenge with efficiency. What we are looking at is how we can best use the money at our disposal to best benefit the customer. It's going to be about being a bit smarter with our network and how we operate it. The maintenance and repair alliances are key to that moving forward." allows for investment in the workforce and bringing through the right talent. "One of the most positive aspects of entering into these relationships is that it's a 15-year period, and that gives us the opportunity to look long term in how we are investing, not just in capital expenditure but also in how we develop our people," says Davey. "It gives us a long- term view when it comes to our talent programme for example, and we have been working with Anglian Water on that. We can take a long-term view on innovation. If you look at any historical AMP period, at this stage we would have been rebidding and retendering and we would have been putting a lot of time and effort into that – and Anglian Water would have been involved in negotiations and assessing the bids. But instead what we are doing now is putting all of our collective effort into being ready for AMP7." Integrated Maintenance and Repair (IMR) Water CLIENT: Anglian Water PARTNERS: Clancy Docwra, Kier CONTRACT: Water network repair and maintenance TERM: 15 years (5+5+5) Integrated Maintenance and Repair (IMR) Water Recycling CLIENT: Anglian Water PARTNERS: Clancy Docwra, Kier, Claret Civil Engineering, Danaher& Walsh, Public Sewer Services CONTRACT: Wastewater maintenance and repair TERM: 15 years (5+5+5) Improving the water network, one pipe at a time Maintaining optimal water recycling

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