Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/1144867
Success stories NWG celebrated 26 of the best ideas that have emerged from the company's re- cent innovation programmes and events 1. Common infrastructure map (IF17/18/OS) 2. Satellite monitoring (IF17/Microso ) 3. Nuron (IF17/Reece Innovation) 4. Moss tree (IF17/OS) 5. Barnacle (IF18/CGI) 6. Digital Twins (IF18/Newcastle University) 7. Street level sensing (IF18/Wipro) 8. Survey automated management (IF18 Interserve/Wood) 9. IQ18 – Smart Diffusion 10. IQ18 – runner up 11. Leaky Loos (IF18/Every Drop Counts) 12. Fans for Life (IF18/Explain) 13. Remote monitoring device (IF18) 14. Utileyes (IF16/NWG innovation event) 15. Asset maintenance analytics (iAM) 16. Electronic DMA Information packs (IF18/Wipro) 17. Social listening (IF17/CGI) 18. Alexa skills (IF17/CGI) 19. Andrew Turner Innovation Ltd Torpedo (SME collaboration) 20. Down pipe 21. Suds Planter/Soficus (IF18/Durham University) 22. Anaerobic gas upgrade (R&D project) 23. Clampy (IF18/CGI) 24. Sewer flooding analytics (IF18/Hitachi) 25. Well Being App/menopause training (IF18/O2) 26. Field worker app Festival of ideas Northumbrian Water Group's 2019 Innovation Festival was the biggest to date. Robin Hackett talks to director of information services Nigel Watson about how the latest event will help guide the company into the future The Knowledge Innovation Zone O ver the course of five days in July, more than 3,000 people from nearly 750 different organisations attended the third NWG Innovation Festival at Newcastle Racecourse, tasked with coming up with solutions to a variety of challenges through design sprints, data hacks and workshops. While the focus of the event is on quality ideas rather than quantity, this year's event was the biggest to date, with attendance up around 50 per cent on 2018, and has helped the company conceive and develop a wide range of projects. "The primary objective is coming up with ideas to help improve our business, and I think we achieved that," Nigel Wat- son, Northumbrian Water Group's director of information services, says. "We're always looking at our processes and encouraging our staff to come up with ideas for improvement, but the Innovation Festival is about doing something that's perhaps a little bit more of a quantum leap – something that takes us forward in a big step that you wouldn't ordinarily get through incremental improvement." This year's event provided an opportuni- ty to celebrate some of the company's most successful innovations of recent times, with NWG presenting 26 ideas that had been de- veloped either at previous festivals, includ- ing an initial three-day innovation sprint in 2016, or through other channels such as the 'InvestQuest' employee competition. Those ideas (see below) include the Water Industry Award-winning Utileyes app, which allows technicians to view potential problems inside customers' homes and elsewhere remotely; the common infrastructure map, a digital system for underground utilities developed along- side Ordnance Survey that has attracted 26 | AUGUST 2019 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk