Case study

Northumbrian Water Limited provides water and wastewater services to 2.6 million people in North East England, trading as Northumbrian Water, and water services to 1.7 million people in the South East, trading as Essex & Suffolk Water. The company owns, maintains, and operates 41,000km of water mains and sewers, just over 500 treatment plants, nearly 400 water storage sites, and more than 1000 pumping stations.

NWL wanted to monitor and compare the performance of assets to drive performance improvements and optimize investment decisions, a well as capture and analyse asset and process level data from disparate sources in a timely manner, identify trends, and carry out forward analysis to enable proactive asset management. Also asked to make corporate data more accessible to support the accurate and fast production of management information and regulatory reports.

C3 global were tasked with implementing an asset performance solution to monitor the performance of the NWL asset base, thereby leveraging their legacy systems to maximise the return on investment (ROI) and the automatic extraction of data at pre-set intervals from Oracle Warehouse Builder and other sources. Key performance indicators were to be produced, such as costs and chemical usage, compliance data and power consumption, for all locations across the company, which would result in opportunities to share best practices and reduce costs further. The solution would also provide access to and analysis tools to all data relating to costs and activities in a single environment, used to eliminate the need to compare information from multiple spreadsheets, from which better informed and quicker decisions could be made.

Asset managers were able to conduct top-down, bottom-up analysis and monitor trends to identify opportunities to reduce costs, improve risk management and meet regulatory and compliance requirements, predict failures and maintenance requirements and identify those parts of the operation that are under performing, resulting in quick and accurate analysis of potential problems to avoid unnecessary costs being incurred. Automation of the production of daily and monthly asset performance reports through the use of intelligent business rules and exception reporting enabled the Northumbrian management team where to focus their efforts and prioritise investment to maximise the ROI on their assets. They were able to use performance reports to make informed business decisions, which will lead to improved service, reduced costs and increased business transparency in the preparation of the 2009 review.