reducing the volume of Internal Sewer Floods for a major UK water utility
the challenge:
Internal Sewer Floods not only incur substantial penalties, they are one of the worst issues a customer can face. Our client needed our help to reduce the volume of Internal Sewer Floods (ISFs) experienced by their customers to meet new regulatory targets. Failure to meet these targets would result in significant financial penalties.
the results
There was a 22% reduction in ISF incidents during the engagement, growing to a 32% reduction when all initiatives were deployed. This resulted in a £13m saving associated with penalty avoidance.
There was a further £1m of penalties which could be claimed back from civils partners once it was identified that the root cause of some issues was directly related to poor civils work by contractors.
how we got there
Data is only useful if you know what to do with it. We started by interrogating the data and conducting structured interviews to determine the underlying cause of the ISFs. We identified that one of the significant causes was the lack of an effective process for managing the supply of resource to undertake the planned and reactive workload. In short, there simply weren’t enough crews being deployed.
Working with local teams, we developed a new process to align forecast demand with the supply of resource, with built in measurement, KPIs and performance reviews to ensure that workload demands were actively managed. We also established a control desk to support the field teams to help them complete work on an initial visit, reducing follow on jobs. Working with civils partners, we developed a fast-track process for handling civils jobs related to ISFs.
We established performance hubs as a critical enabler to drive performance, using visual management techniques and training the team in problem solving techniques so that they could focus on the key performance metrics and could work proactively to manage issues and spot risks.
By introducing the Lean concepts of waste and non-value add activities, the team were able to recognise that much of the work undertaken by their field teams was adding little value. Using their new problem solving techniques, our client was able to eliminate waste from the system.
