Water & Wastewater Treatment

6 | JANUARY 2016 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk Comment H appy new year to all our readers. As the weather gets colder across the country, and many of us face the threat of pipe bursts around the home, water companies face similar threats on a larger scale as maintaining the water network becomes more of a challenge. While the majority of the country takes a break around the festive season, the public are indebted to workers in the water sector who oen work unsocial hours to tackle leaks and unexpected stoppages. As WWT went to press, much of the north of England was once again struggling from the effects of flood waters, and thoughts must go out to those affected and to those working hard to clean up and rebuild. In such situations, resilience is an o-used word, and so it's timely that last month saw the report from When the going gets tough Ofwat's task group on building resilience in the sector. Resilience is defined early on in the report as "the ability to cope with, and recover from, disruption, and anticipate trends and variability in order to maintain services for people and protect the natural environment now and in the future." It's as good a definition as any, as far as the water sector and resilience are concerned. But while the first part of the sentence – coping with and recovering from disruption – tends to be what springs to mind when resilience is discussed, it is actually the second clause, around anticipating and preparing for future variability, where the most useful work can be done. Thankfully, it is also an area where technology can help. In this month's Industry Leader interview (P16), Bob Taylor of Bournemouth Water raises the prospect of how smart network technology might fully eliminate leakage in the industry over the next 30 to 40 years. The future undoubtedly lies in using data from web-enabled assets to gain a heightened awareness of what is going on in the network in order to anticipate and pre-empt failures. However, smart innovation is in its James brockett eDItor JamesBrockett@fav-house.com Twitter: @wwtmag infancy in the industry, and it could be some time before the burgeoning 'internet of things' allows the reactive nature of much of the sector's operational work to be replaced by something more proactive and predictive. But that is not to say that much that is 'smart' is not happening today. On page 11 in our Front Line feature, we hear from a member of Welsh Water's Smart Hub team, on some of the steps that DCWW is taking to turn a simple control room into a Smart Hub. We also explore some of the data techniques that can make a difference in our Digging Deeper feature on page 27. The more scheduled, proactive maintenance that can take place, based on actionable intelligence, then the less the industry will need to mount reactive response operations and the less we'll see operatives called out in the early hours through the winter to react to emergencies. It's clear that being more resilient doesn't mean becoming tougher and working harder. While these are admirable qualities, the key to resilience can just as readily be working smarter. -Follow James and WWT colleagues on Twitter: @wwtmag Industry view sponsored by keith Hayward, sales and marketing manager, Hydro International Wastewater Getting the right balance between risk and reward is a critical success factor for any business, but for UK water com- panies those cash prizes and penalties are driven by a regulator, through their Outcome Delivery Incentives (ODIs). Against this framework, achieving game-changing shi s in water company risk-averse cultures can seem a distant prospect, especially when any aspirations for change are pitted against the pressing day-to-day realities of the five-year AMP merry-go-round. These frustrations, and limitations, were clear to me at the latest Round Table debate hosted by WWT, and featured on pages 12/13 of this month's Balancing risk and reward issue. The topic Embedding Effective Asset Management developed the totex themes of the last event. Representing the equipment supplier on the panel, a key question for me was how the water industry can successfully embed the whole supply chain to engineer true life-cycle value from its assets. Without the co-operation of suppliers, surely the effective asset management goal can never be fully achieved? The first step is recognising that 'best price' is not the same as 'lowest cost'. An innovative engineering solution should be one that designs out operating and maintenance costs over the 25 or 30-year life of an asset. That may demand higher standards of performance to be set at the procurement stage. Although the capital cost could be higher, the result will be a net saving over the lifetime of the asset. However, to achieve this, a water company has to take a risk. It also has to have sufficient plant operating data to recognise when a difference has been made. Successfully incentivising contractual suppliers to deliver totex is far from straightforward. As one panel member astutely observed, our industry framework has created barriers between capex and opex and what re-connects them is serviceability. Linking equipment investment more closely with a service and maintenance commitment is one way to encourage an outcome-based supply chain model that mitigates water company risk. To find solutions will require cross- industry collaboration, considering amongst other things design standardisation, procurement and supplier frameworks, contracting practices and encouring innovation. I look forward to being involved. www.hydro-int.com

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