Efficiency Unlocked: How can we make Water Companies 10X more efficient?
How might we help UK water companies identify, prioritise, deliver and embed efficiency — through culture, data and digital innovation?
The water sector faces unprecedented pressures, with PR24 requiring significant improvements in customer and environmental service. At the same time, the last year has seen endless news articles and media coverage questioning the financial sustainability of the industry.
With that background we must increasingly embed efficiency into how we do business. This will ensure every pound is spent wisely, we eliminate waste and allocate our resources where they are most effective. This will help ensure our company remains financially robust.
Our aim is to explore how water companies can become 10 times more efficient by exploring:
- Priority - where we can become increasingly efficient.
- People - how we can better develop a culture of efficiency so it becomes ‘business as usual’.
- Planning - where better forward planning could enable greater efficiency.
- Product – where and how could technical and other solutions help us deliver a more efficient organisation.
Over the course of the sprint we will prototype processes and data-enabled solutions that could be deployed and developed as part of a wider efficiency programme. We will work collaboratively with colleagues and partners to do this, prioritising efficiency efforts where savings will enable us to reinvest against our customer and environmental commitments.
This sprint is sponsored by CK Delta, bringing deep expertise in operational efficiency, benchmarking, and AI-driven transformation. The sprint will demonstrate how utilities can build a credible and continuously improving efficiency capability.
This sprint is open to anyone working in utilities organisations, seeking to deliver efficiencies to better reinvest in organisational priorities.
It is also open to technology, data and automation experts to explore how we can better baseline, predict and implement efficiency initiatives within the water sector.
- Where are the biggest efficiency opportunities?
Which business processes, cost categories, failure-demand patterns, asset decisions, and operational workflows offer the greatest potential for material savings? - What does “10x efficiency” mean in a regulated water company?
How can efficiency be defined in a way that protects service, resilience, customer outcomes, environmental performance, and ODI commitments? - How do we embed efficiency into culture?
How can efficiency become part of day-to-day decision-making rather than a periodic finance exercise? What role should our people play in ensuring organisational efficiency? - What data exists in relation to priority efficiency areas?
What data exists that can help us create current baselines for efficiency and measure impact, both within central business processes (e.g. financial) and within operational delivery (e.g. SCADA, ERP, Maximo, and CIS data silos)? - How do we deliver improvements to realise efficiency? Do we ask people to do ‘do efficiency’ on top of their day job, do we need dedicated inhouse resources, do we appoint contract partners?
- How can technology help?
How could background agents, normalisation layers, knowledge stores, benchmarks, guardrails, audit trails, and role-based dashboards help baseline and deliver efficiency? - What prototypes or MVPs should be built next?
What practical solutions and enablers (processes, working groups, plans) can be demonstrated at the end of the sprint and taken forward into a 12 month delivery roadmap?
By the end of the sprint, we aim to have co-created:
- A prioritised map of efficiency opportunity areas across business delivery, processes and spending.
- Identification of initiatives that could support cultural adoption of efficiency into leadership, teams, incentives, governance, and frontline behaviours.
- A 12+ month roadmap of actions and initiatives aligned to agreed priority areas.
- Agreement on most important MVP/s to further develop to support efficiency plan and agreed timelines for development and testing.
- A set of “performance guardrails” to ensure efficiency does not damage service, compliance, resilience, safety, or customer outcomes.