Building a more intelligent asset base to inform operational decisions and move from reactive to proactive ways of working
the challenge:
Our water industry client was part way through a multi-year business wide transformation to better utilise their existing asset base to deliver against challenging customer, environmental and financial objectives.
The client faced a number of challenges in building a more intelligent asset base. These included legacy reactive & siloed ways of working; limited capacity for business improvement, limited alignment around a vision for the future, and lots of poor quality data.
Their ambition was to gather more data from their existing assets and use it to inform more ‘intelligent’ decisions enabling accurate condition monitoring, targeted proactive maintenance, and remote operation.
the results
We worked with the operational control centre to identify and bring to life a future-state vision, demonstrate the capabilities and release the capacity required to achieve digitally enabled asset management and operation.
We aligned senior stakeholders around the end-state vision and capabilities and put in place cross-functional teams to evolve the proof of concept.
Whilst building the proof of concept for the future-state, our work on the existing processes is expected to enable 35% of control centre capacity to be reinvested across 2 years.
how we got there
The project was delivered both virtually & in person, with in person events held across the project for key workshops, and sponsor and stakeholder sessions. There were 4 key workstreams:
Transformation Journey
Through internal stakeholder interviews, external insight, and strategy alignment events, we explored and developed a joined up, guiding vision of a future Operating Centre lying at the heart of an intelligence-led water organisation. Defining a core mission statement enabled us to characterise how the Operating Centre evolves from its current predominantly service monitoring and assurance capacity, towards a much broader strategic service enhancement and definition role. This was brought to life through the definition of a set of high level value propositions. We then identified the new core capabilities required, and specified the key internal and external interfaces.
Build the New (BtN)
We created a proof of concept pilot by applying new, future-vision thinking to current tools and systems to iteratively develop new approaches that rapidly deliver value. We held a series of workshops and showcases to identify and prioritise opportunities, map datasets, and engage representatives from across the business. We established a cross-functional team and we defined a roadmap to a remote, fully-automated future-state product.
Control Centre Enhancement (CCE)
The initial focus was to release capacity in the control centre (to then reinvest it in later, larger initiatives), to improve employee wellbeing and to lay the foundations for an enhanced control centre, integrating live data inputs with remotely enabled capital for quicker, more automated decision making. We prioritised 7 quick win initiatives and designed a delivery plan for further initiatives using Scrum methodology.
Performance Management
This stream modelled capacity supply to anticipated capability demand via a more richly connected asset base. With control centre philosophy evolving from responsive alarm monitoring to predictive and preventative signal management, our thinking needed to go beyond straightforward volume comparisons, and into anticipating new ways of working and associated resources and capabilities evolution.
