Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
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www.wwtonline.co.uk | WWT | JANUARY 2019 | 11 agement buy-in, with everyone from the CEO to the guy in the postroom understand- ing that it is part of their everyday work." Data innovation required Carl Pheasey, Ofwat's director of strategy and policy, called on water companies to step up on innovation, saying creative thinking is needed across a wide variety of areas, including technology and data. "There's lots going on in this space," he said. "We're already continuing to pro- gress thinking about innovation and we now really want to see the industry step up and demonstrate that it's solving some of the cultural problems on innovation." Pheasey said there can be a tendency for those outside the sector to see innova- tion almost exclusively in terms of cutting leakage but that it is important to imple- ment the concept when trying to address other key issues, including driving down per capita consumption (PCC). As such, he said there is a need to combine "hard engineering and techno- logical solutions with innovative demand management and customer behaviour- type innovations and solutions". He continued: "Since 2000, demand for water in the South East has remained fairly flat even though population has increased quite substantially. It's clear that it flows in part from a combination of efforts to reduce demand, technological innovation in terms of household appli- ances, and also efforts to increase meter- SPONSORED BY "There has been a significant increase in the availability and exploitation of customer data in other, more competitive customer-facing sectors… we see real benefits of making better use of the data at your fingertips." Carl Pheasey Director of strategy and policy, Ofwat THE SPEAKERS "There is a problem I believe in the UK industry around fragmentation – there are a lot of organisations doing similar things. We need to come together around common themes, and this is what a platform for innovation could give us." Steve Kaye Chief executive, UKWIR INNOVATION SPRINTS For the first time, the conference featured 'innovation sprints' around five of the water sector's biggest challenges: leakage, customer service, water resource management, energy & sustainability, and developing effective innovation partnerships. Led by Northumbrian Water innovation facilitator Eddie Wrigley, the leakage challenge set out to identify ways of achieving the industry's holy grail: zero leakage. Ideas emerging from the session included an industry-wide 'National Leakage Innovation Challenge', with £500 million in funding from Government and the water companies, and an AI system to understand the entire network that could target leakage and predict failure, with UKWIR potentially taking the lead. The most popular idea among delegates, though, was a project to better understand water balance through 100 per cent monitoring in pilot areas, moving street by street, and making use of analytics and machine learning to detect anomalies. Ideas from the Innovation Partnerships session, which was sponsored by Novotek, included a 'Technology Adoption Fund' aimed at helping new water technologies gain a foothold in the market, procedures for early contractor involvement and to overcome procurement barriers, and 'gain sharing' financial models for innovative technology. "We found there was a lot of thinking that spoke to organisational design – there's no doubt that risk management and procurement can become barriers that stifle innovation," said session facilitator Sean Robinson, so ware solutions manager at Novotek. "Participants felt there was scope for collaboration with regulator on funding, and to have some sort of incubator fund for innovation, a model that has worked well in other sectors." ing penetration in the region. "The lesson is that, over the long-term, hard engineering solutions won't be suf- ficient if you want to make in-roads into the problems that there is now a lot of political focus on. A combination of gain- ing a better understanding of consumer behaviour and technological innovation, such as better ways of detecting and fix- ing leaky mains, is going to be required." He said that reflects the importance of making better use of customer data and highlighted the regulator's 'Unlocking the Value in Customer Data' report, which was published last year. "That was a reflection of our slight frus- tration that we didn't see a lot of evidence of companies applying the lessons that are increasingly coming from other sectors such as financial services," he said. "Increas- ingly, we see there being scope for water companies to share. Over the last year or so, we've been facilitating a discussion between companies on exploring opportu- nities for opening up some customer data and I think those discussions are now mov- ing onto sharing operational data. We want to see those discussions continue because we think they stand to have really signifi- cant impacts on operational and customer service issues." The 2018 WWT Water Industry Tech- nology Innovation conference was held on 27 November in Birmingham and sponsored by Hitachi, Novotek and Xylem