reducing waste, maximising impact: tackling internal sewer floods for a UK water utility
the challenge
Internal Sewer Floods (ISFs) not only incur substantial penalties; they’re also one of the worst issues a customer can face. Our client needed our help to reduce the volume of Internal Sewer Floods experienced by their customers to meet new regulatory targets. Failure to meet these targets would result in significant financial penalties.
the results
22% reduction in ISF incidents during engagement, rising to a 32% reduction when all initiatives were deployed
This also resulted in a £13m saving (by avoiding penalties)
And an additional £1m reclaimed from civil partners (once it was identified that the root cause of some issues was directly related to poor civils work by contractors)
the process
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.