Crowders hosted a Leakage Consistency working group in Liverpool to discuss the Ofwat report with each of their UK clients and the changes being made to improve reporting methods.
The Ofwat report outlines the process to develop the reporting guidance which includes explanatory notes and commentary on the justification for each component. Crowders aim to comply with the PR19 Water Resource Management Plans (WRMPs) by meeting Ofwat requirements in a consistent manner to standardise the method of reporting performance.
Water companies in England and Wales report information on their performance annually to Ofwat. For Annual Return 2020/21, the water companies will be required to comply with the consistency requirements for this reporting. The benefits of improving the techniques are having a greater clarity of reporting, a better consistency of reporting by applying good practice and a strong customer and stakeholder trust.
Crowders are developing Netbase to fulfil the reporting requirements outlined in the report by conducting workshops with each individual UK client water company. Netbase developments will include dynamic data parameters to store more frequent data such as night use. By April 2018, phase 1 development of Netbase will be nearing completion. There will be upgrades for UK clients involving phase 2 specifications (including Smart Data Analysis) and development with pilot testing in March 2019.
Crowders have recognised the importance of working closely with clients to meet the requirements and so, in 2018, there will be technical working groups providing a detailed method to develop the best practice analysis approach. Clients will then have the ability to utilise the software to produce Smart Data Analysis such as fast logging, AMR/AMI analysis, etc. These working groups will be reinforced with regular meetings for progress updates and reviews.
Dennis Dellow from Northumbrian Water Limited stated that “the Crowder team have clearly put a great deal of thought into the future needs of their Netbase client companies resulting from the Leakage Consistency initiative. The proposed development programme that Crowders have presented today represents a very substantial body of work, but it will provide us with long term benefits that will go well beyond the short term need to comply with the Consistency report”.
Another client who attended the conference, Andrew Oakes from Thames Water said “the day was extremely useful for seeing the future direction of Netbase development, and seeing how this will map against our wider Netbase development requirements”. Alicja Solarczyk from United Utilities thought “the day was very informative and well delivered. It was good to see a preview of the new developments and how they will make Netbase processes aligned to the new convergence requirements”.