Water & Wastewater Treatment

Industry Round Table: Totex it, including electricity and gas, rail, airports and others. "What we learned quite quickly was that Totex is just a door that opens to a whole range of different ways of operating your business," says Fulton. "We also learned some key things around asset data and information. Fundamentally, you have to know your asset base to be able to make better decisions and ultimately make Totex worth it. Some of the businesses we saw spent hundreds of millions on their data strategies. It makes you think 'wow, this is quite important'." Fulton says that too o-en decision-making in the water sector is short term, with a tendency to "throw things over the wall" into capital spending without taking the time to properly evaluate an asset decision in terms of whole-life cost. He encouraged his colleagues to adopt a more analytical approach called the "blue box" – a name that emerged from a blue box he drew on a flipchart one day in a meeting – when taking such decisions. "The blue box is effectively this: before you throw stuff over the wall at the word capital, put it in the blue box, think about what it is you want and what's driving the root cause of the issue before you go anywhere near spending any money on it," says Fulton. "It's about really getting under the skin as early as possible before you make any decisions about what you want to do." This kind of calculation, using the 40 year figure, has become 'business as usual' at Anglian over the last year, and Fulton estimates that the company has made around £27M of savings merely by instilling this approach. Andrew Eastwood, Programme Office Manager at Northumbrian Water, also believes that water has much to learn from other sectors. He joined Northumbrian six months ago with a background in big capital programmes – he has worked on both the Olympics and HS2 – and he cites some of the design and build decisions for the Olympic project as exemplars of Totex-led thinking. "The best example is the basketball court, where building a new centre would have meant too many stadia le- on the site," says Eastwood. "Some bright spark said, 'why don't we just put a tent up?' So the actual basketball stadium was just a big, glorified tent. That same tent went to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, and has now gone to Rio. Someone had the foresight to question why all that money should be spent on an asset when there was a smarter solution, and that's exactly what happened." Smarter maintenance One lesson he feels the sector needs to take on board is greater consideration of what happens to an asset once it is built, especially where repairs and maintenance are concerned; other industries routinely engage with the supply 20 | JuLY 2015 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk chain to establish the maintenance costs for a new asset many years in advance. While the uncertainties of the five-year regulatory cycle do act as a constraint in the water sector, he says he would like Northumbrian to work with its supply chain more on such matters, possibly via the use of longer-term framework agreements. "We're quite arm's length with our supply chain at the moment. I don't think we're going to innovate and embrace a Totex world unless we start pulling our supply chain closer to us," says Eastwood. Nigel Earnshaw, Asset (l-r) Graham Fulton (Anglian) Andrew Eastwood (Northumbrian); Nigel Earnshaw (B&V) (l-r) Mark Higham (Siemens); Helen Samuels (united utilities); Neil Wilson (Wessex) • Round table participants ● Paul Horton, Chief Executive, Future Water Association (Chair) ● Nigel Earnshaw, Asset Management Director, Black & Veatch ● Andrew Eastwood, Programme Office Manager, Northumbrian Water ● Graham Fulton, Totex Programme Leader, Anglian Water ● Keith Hayward, Sales & Marketing Manager, Wastewater, Hydro International ● Mark Higham, UK General Manager Process & Automation, Siemens ● Sarah McMath, Head of Strategic Business Planning, Thames Water ● Helen Samuels, Director of Engineering, United Utilities ● David Widdowson, Head of Asset Programme Management & Finance, Yorkshire Water ● Neil Wilson, Head of Risk and Investment, Wessex Water

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