Ofwat’s Asset Management Maturity Assessment: What You Need to Know
Ofwat, the water regulator in the UK, recently published the Asset Management Maturity and Assessment (AMMA) report, detailing a number of insights and recommendations to help improve the sector’s asset management maturity. Ofwat expects all UK water companies to reflect on the report findings and identify appropriate steps to improve their asset management capabilities.
How does Copperleaf help?
The following six recommendations were highlighted in the report:
- Board oversight and engagement on risks: “Companies should improve their approaches to risk management by ensuring boards have clear oversight and understanding of current and future asset health risks and of the plans to mitigate these.”
The Copperleaf® Decision Analytics Solution ensures a more efficient and transparent asset investment decision-making process through business intelligence reports and dashboards. Executives and other stakeholders are provided with real-time access to the most current data, such as asset health or investment scenarios.
According to Chris Royce, Head of Asset and Investment Strategy at Anglian Water:
Copperleaf’s dashboards and reporting tools allow us to derive greater insight and increase the transparency and stability of the investment plan. The system allows us to show information at all different levels of the organisation and make it personal to those people. If I’m a board director, I want to see what’s happening at a strategic level. If I’m a planner, I want to see what’s happening on the assets. Copperleaf is helping us develop, articulate, and visualise our 5-year Business Plan to our regulator, shareholders, directors, and customers.
- Linkages between short, medium and long-term planning: “Companies should improve their approaches to long-term planning, ensuring alignment between short, medium, and long-term objectives in their strategies and plans.”
Copperleaf helps companies predict asset sustainment needs over any time horizon and optimise portfolios of investments to deliver the greatest value while proactively managing risk. Short, medium, and long-term plans can all be optimised in a single enterprise-wide system.
According to Carol Cairns, Strategic Planning Manager at Northumbrian Water:
The Copperleaf solution really gives us an opportunity to optimise our investment plans. It helps us optimise in the short, medium and long term. It also helps us optimise between our capital and our operational planned investments.
- Uncertainty: “Companies should systematically identify and consider uncertainty in all areas of asset management, from strategic asset planning to data quality management.”
The Copperleaf solution enables organisations to create and analyse multiple scenarios and understand the robustness of the plan under different assumptions to make trade-off decisions quickly and with confidence. Organisations can quickly model the impact of multiple business constraints so that strategies and contingency plans can be developed for every eventuality. With Copperleaf’s Performance Prediction capability, companies can also understand how uncertainty will impact expected portfolio performance and gain accurate insights into the expected costs, benefits, and risks mitigated by their capital plans.
- Data and asset information strategy: “Companies should develop a strategic approach to data and information management that takes into account the ability to share data.”
Copperleaf helps companies transition from spreadsheets and stand-alone tools to an efficient, centralised system for planning and optimising capital investments across thousands of diverse assets. This ensures that all investment decisions are based on a single source of truth and enables stakeholders to collaborate efficiently. The Copperleaf solution provides a rigorous, transparent, and auditable approach to asset management decision making that supports internal governance processes and procedures.
- Skills and capabilities: “Companies should make sure that employee competencies and skills are appropriately considered to plan and manage their assets efficiently now and in the future.”
The Copperleaf solution provides access to best practice analytics and employees are trained to use the system independently for all in-AMP investment decisions, not only for business plan development. By capturing investment planning data, assumptions, and best practices in a single enterprise repository, corporate knowledge is captured and accessible to employees.
- Value and benefits realisation: “Companies should systematically consider wider aspects of social and environmental value in decision-making and monitor whether delivered interventions provide the benefits expected in their planning.”
The Copperleaf Value Framework empowers companies to value dissimilar investments on a common economic scale, ensuring decisions will deliver the most value and drive strategic objectives. Any number of value measures can be added, including mitigated risk, financial and non-financial benefits, improvements to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and more. Copperleaf helps organisations strike a balance between meeting existing business objectives—and delivering on increasingly important social and environmental outcomes.
According to Sarah Sayer, Head of Investment Programme Management at Affinity Water:
We now have a library of all investments. Team members enter candidate investments into the same system using a consistent format and common financial metrics to quantify risks, costs, benefits, opportunities, and/or needs. We can now compare apples, oranges, and giraffes because everything is valued on a common economic scale. This allows us to consider the relative importance of different projects and make the best decisions about what to invest in.
Interested in learning more about Copperleaf and how we support some of the largest asset-intensive companies in the water sector and beyond? Contact us today.