Blog Hero Water Treatment - Copperleaf Decision Analytics

August 1, 2018

Written by: Copperleaf

Anglian Water Wins the Copperleaf’s Inaugural “Innovator of the Year” Award!

At our recent 2018 Copperleaf™ AIPM Summit, we celebrated the most unique and outstanding things our customers are doing with the Copperleaf Decision Analytics Solution. Each nominee showcased their unique project, and attendees voted live to decide which customer would win the inaugural Copperleaf Community “Innovator of the Year” Award.

The nominees were:

  • ONE Gas
    • Project: Value Framework Upgrades with Integrated JANA Risk Models
  • ENMAX 
    • Project: Fully Optimized Portfolio with Multiple Value Functions and New Value Measures
  • Manitoba Hydro
    • Project: Enterprise-Wide Decision Making and Detailed Sensitivity Analysis
  • Anglian Water
    • Project: Storage Points Asset Group Planning and Stakeholder Dashboards

While the competition was tough, Anglian Water received almost 40% of the votes to take home the Innovation award. It’s pretty hard to beat using Copperleaf’s optimization to improve the quality of drinking water!

Innovation is one of Anglian Water’s three pillars of business culture. They are focused on embracing challenges and transforming their business into a water company for the 21st century, explaining:

Water encapsulates the challenges and opportunities of our time. It is the key to a thriving economy and a flourishing environment. By raising awareness of water’s importance, by changing how we think about and use it, Anglian Water wants to lead the way towards a sustainable future.

One of Anglian Water’s challenges was finding an innovative way to improve their storage point component optimization (a storage point is the last point of treated water before it reaches a customer’s faucet). According to the Drinking Water Inspectorate (Dec 2016) report, the UK’s water industry has been experiencing a fourfold increase in water quality issues at storage points compared to treatment works.

Anglian Water manages an asset stock of over 800 storage points, including water towers, treated water reservoirs, and contact tanks. Historically, the water industry has used a single deterioration model for all storage compartments on a fixed 10-year internal inspection regime. However, since each storage point has multiple components, different installed dates, and numerous deterioration curves, Anglian Water recognized the need to optimize its interventions in order to reduce risk of multiple points of failure. This created a complex mathematical problem of asset deterioration on multiple assets with fixed planned inspection times—requiring a sophisticated solution such as Copperleaf, which could handle all these moving parts.

Enhancements were made to the Value Framework in the Copperleaf solution to address this challenge. A value model was developed for storage points, which calculates Weibull deterioration curves for each asset, evaluates a variety of replacement and refurbishment interventions, and uses constraints to ensure that optimized interventions are aligned with inspections.

With Copperleaf, Anglian Water has created a new leading approach that has resulted in significant benefits, including:

  • Better understanding of whole lifecycle costs and how remaining asset life will delay, reduce or eliminate both capital and operational expenditure
  • Improved ability to plan the right level of maintenance and operational activity
  • Enhanced confidence in inspection and testing results will enable optimized site visit programs to be developed
  • Approach will inform long-term spending requirements, maximizing benefits over multiple AMP periods
  • Best practice approach increases confidence in asset integrity and ability to deliver the appropriate water quality
  • Improved assurance around asset management of service reservoirs will result in greater customer and regulator confidence
  • New approach will support preparation of the PR19 regulatory submission

Congratulations to Anglian Water on winning the 2018 Copperleaf Community “Innovator of the Year” Award! We look forward to next year’s Copperleaf AIPM Summit and celebrating the new and creative things our customers are doing with Copperleaf.

Anglian Water has realized a number of additional enterprise-wide benefits by using Copperleaf, including continuous planning and management, integrated totex costing capability, enhanced workforce productivity, and enhanced portfolio and scenario capability.

To learn more about the innovative ways that Anglian Water is using Copperleaf, please read our case study.