Water & Wastewater Treatment

10 | August 2015 | WWt | www.wwtonline.co.uk Industry leader Ian Kirkaldy, Chief Engineer, southern Water "We have to become an intelligent client… we are learning again how to be an engineering organisation." Interview by James Brockett T hings are growing fast in the engineering department of Southern Water. When Ian Kirkaldy joined the company 18 months ago, he was an engineering department of one. Now, with a team of around 70 in-house engineers based at Southern's Falmer Office, and recruitment continuing apace, Kirkaldy jokes that he has almost got to the point where he struggles to remember everybody's names. The rapid expansion is part of a fundamental shi„ in the way that Southern approaches its engineering projects. Kirkaldy was hired by CEO Matthew Wright to rebuild Southern's in-house engineering capability towards an 'intelligent client' model, as he explains. "We had, probably through a series of very good business reasons at the time, got to the point where we had heavily outsourced our engineering and delivery capability in one form or another to the supply chain," says Kirkaldy. "As we moved towards this AMP, the feeling was that to achieve our customer commitments we had to become an intelligent client, able to optimise our assets and taking responsibility for their long term performance. Fundamentally, as a client organisation, we can't get away from the fact that we're building assets that last 20, 60 or 100 years, and we have to take responsibility for their long term performance for our customers." Fast forward another 18 months and Southern expects to have 110 or 120 in-house engineers on board. But this does not mean the utility is cutting off its external partners – on the contrary, Southern's Strategic Solutions Partner, MWH, has around 70 engineering specialists embedded at Southern working alongside in-house staff, in what Kirkaldy labels a 'salt and pepper' organisation. He says that MWH is playing a crucial role in enhancing their skills, and that knowledge transfer between the two is essential. "Our SSP is literally our partner, and part of that partnership is to help us build our own capabilities," says Kirkaldy. "For example, we are about to roll out our new CAD and IT tools - the first stage of that happened in June, and the next stage is in August - and they've helped us shape that, to decide how we specify, acquire, buy, and deploy it. So it's not just the hard engineering that they're offering, it's actually learning again how to be an engineering organisation. They are helping us along that road." One advantage that Southern has, says Kirkaldy, in making such a rapid transformation from a low base is that the company can "leapfrog" stages of development that others have gone through and go straight to the most advanced thinking and practices. The new team is able to start working immediately with cutting- edge design practices such as 3D modelling and BIM, while putting in place efficient processes such as standardized off-site construction. On the other hand, the biggest challenge is that the company has to undergo the transformation while at the same time as starting work on its AMP6 projects. "It's like running for the bus and getting dressed at the same time," Ian Kirkaldy with southern's engineering team

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