Utility Week

36 | MAY 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Operational Excellence Analysis Asset planning and fieldwork moves up a gear Asset planning, operations and delivery is a very different machine in 2021 compared with what it was just a few short years ago. A new Insight Report from Utility Week and AMT-Sybex brings you up to speed. This is a taster. T he asset management function within utility companies has been changing very rapidly during the past decade. Not long ago, the main role of asset engi- neers was to respond to customer complaints – fixing a gas leak, say, quickly and safely. These days, decisions on how and where to spend money on assets has become more like a scientific discipline all of its own. High quality asset data has turned out to be a crucial helper in lining up stakeholder agendas to drive progress. At Anglian Water, James Worthington heads the planned works and asset health team for the drinking water distribution portfolio. He runs the utility's capital delivery element of the Integrated Maintenance and Repair alliance, which groups personnel from Anglian Water, Kier and Clancy Docwra, under a single budget, embedded within the water business. He handles assurance, too, and a co-creation team focused on driving efficiency through new ways of working. Worthington's group delivers capital investments across the network, from routine maintenance to mains rehabilitation, large burst repairs and meter upkeep, to preventa- tive and proactive lead mains replacement. It expects shortly to add proactive leakage repair to its roster, now that a critical mass of sensor installations has been reached. The team leads on asset health – one of Ofwat's PR19 themes, which aims to achieve a bet- ter balance of investment funding versus risk reduction versus maximising the life of the asset. "We use G/Technology and the tools asso- ciated with it. There are front-end interfaces that give us customer details and informa- tion. So if a customer calls in we can iden- tify which asset they are talking about," Worthington says. "It also interacts with our modelling suite so that we can understand, hydraulically, what is happening within the systems. We can extract it and understand what will happen to the wider network if we carry out a particular intervention. Then, when we make investment decisions, we can maximise the balance of value for custom- ers and the life of the asset and operability," he says. Operational visibility Next, it adds data from the operational layer. This provides visibility of hydraulics and physical assets together with how they are operating at a moment in time. "As a starting point, we integrate, investigate all those different systems linked into our management system, to begin to see any anomalies that could point to an issue. Off the back of that, we can target intervention on a specific area. We might send out a team to dig trial holes or a network technician to run valve operations," Worthington says. Stuart Potchinsky, product director at AMT-Sybex, a provider of mobile geospatial map-based and work management systems that helps utility companies to manage daily field work, sees mobile data as a great ena- bler for utilities working with contractors on asset programmes. "The flexibility to access data on multiple devices and platforms supports contractors, because it lets them work independently, according to their own business policies, while at the same time fitting in with the util- ity's structures," Potchinsky says. He adds: "Intuitive design, streamlined digital processes and ease-of-use in the field are big factors here. They let contractors use their own device and get on with the job quickly, with minimal training." Demonstrating efficiency Thames Water, similarly, is investing across its drinking water networks in line with its asset management plan for 2020-25 (AMP7). This includes £300 million on smart meter- ing and the same again on pipework. The company's goal is to install 560,000 smart meters in AMP7, bringing the total to 980,894 by 2025. For below-ground assets, it oversees programmes amounting to 100,000 streetwork permits a year. With such big investments, the technologies which field engineers have at their fingertips play a cen- tral role in overall company efficiency, as well as whether specific targets are hit. "For investing in below-ground assets we have the asset integration management sys- tem, which brings together information on previous bursts, customer complaints, cost data, leakage, supply interruptions," says Tim McMahon, head of water asset manage- ment at Thames Water. These days, 70 per cent of leaks at Thames Water are fixed proactively – before they become visible to customers. The util- ity has also formed Thames Water Connect, a collaboration with other utilities in Lon- don which dig holes in the busy streets. The players are Cadent Gas, SGN, SSE and UKPN. "We think that, to date, that's saved London £5.8 million in non-disruption," McMahon says. The bigger strategic challenge, however, is figuring out how to use existing data to enable, and to be able to demonstrate, cost- efficient delivery of works. "We have good performance risk processes, but how do you bring in financial data so that you can under- stand, at a very detailed level, the cost per job in an area? That's an area of focus for us. No-one has really cracked that. It's quite a hard thing to do," McMahon says.

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