Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 27TH APRIL - 3RD MAY 2018 | 27 Operations & Assets Market view A t its core, innovation is creativity that creates value. So to be innovative, the water companies and their partners need not only the creative "sparks", such as design sprints and data hacks, but also the ability to make sure these ideas come to fruition. This comes in the form of change management to ensure ways of working are sustainably altered to affect a systemic change and generate return on investment. To achieve sustainable innovation, it is helpful to think in three time horizons. Short-term wins The first of these are the short-term wins that ensure incremental innovation – the life- blood of day-to-day operations – working on a one-year horizon. There is a deep well to be tapped by giving front-line teams the support, data, tools and techniques they need to help them solve their own problems locally. This will drive incre- mental continuous improvement and iron out inefficiencies in the current framework. The key to success is to enable the workforce by upskilling them and rewarding managers (not just monetarily) to share the newly iden- tified best practice across the business. Egremont worked with NWG to develop management information systems and imple- ment lean approaches such as "team perfor- mance hubs" for frontline managers. This gave them improved KPIs and a forum and tools to solve problems at each depot/site. NWG is also investigating how to draw on the vast bank of knowledge retained by its retired technicians by dialling in their knowledge from offsite on very short-term contracts as "troubleshooting consultants" when advice is needed. Instead of losing valuable knowledge when technicians leave the business, the relationship is retained to be drawn on in the future. Step change This encompasses innovation for the medium-term – one to two years to achieve full value. For solutions that have a longer time horizon, NWG uses design thinking – a "think, make, do, iterate" methodology – to run innovation events off site that draw on a wide pool of knowledge from inside and outside the company. Over a 3-5 day period, NWG staff and invited guests follow a defined structure to work through a thorny new problem and study different scenarios in workshops to create a new way of working. One such event focused on deep analy- sis of data from pumping stations to predict which stations were likely to fail. The target was to cut pollution events by 80 per cent. The key to implementation success here is a robust end-to-end job-resolution process that Egremont supported NWG to implement with controls/measurement and management practices. When asset failure was imminent, the right crews attended the right jobs at the right time. For the pumping stations, this meant ensuring operators and maintenance staff were engaged in the project from the start and motivated to act when the data sci- ence predicted pump station failure. All the innovative efforts would have counted for nothing if the front line had failed to fix the asset once the risk had been identified. Radical game changer Radical, game-changing innovation has a three to ten-year horizon – or longer – before it can achieve full value. For the bystander, this is where innova- tion thrives – those headline grabbing, blue sky-gazing ideas that make a company seem so cutting edge but oen never become real- ity. NWG works on such low-probability "moon shot" ideas by scanning the market to see what it can learn from related sectors and the world at large. The biggest project in this area is a collab- oration with Newcastle University to build an "innovation street" with advanced telemetry built into every house. The idea is to create a house that changes with the lifestyle of the occupants, and can be managed by external agencies to even out demand for key utilities. Value from creativity The best ideas in the world will only work if leaders take seriously both the creativity stage and also develop the conditions to ena- ble a sustainable change to create value. This means being prepared to back innovation over the long term, understanding that it can take ten ideas to get one that really works, and being brave enough to think well beyond the next financial year or next AMP cycle. With pressures on cost increasing every year, the value realised by innovation, as opposed to how much creativity is gener- ated, is oen dictated by the way the busi- ness responds to the changes needed. This is where a motivated workforce is essential. Employees should be bought on board early so they feel part of any new innovations. Only then will these new ideas move beyond the whiteboard into our everyday work prac- tices and the homes of our customers. Nigel Watson, information services director at Northumbrian Water Group, and Alex Graham, principal consultant at Egremont How to really impress Ofwat In the water industry, innovation without a purpose is a decorative fountain fed by a leaky pipe. Nigel Watson and Alex Graham explain how to mobilise a workforce behind sustainable innovation.

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