Bristol Water Optimises AMP7 Investment Following PR19 Planning Success

In preparation for the 2019 Price Review (PR19), Bristol Water has successfully optimised its asset planning and operational improvements for both cost and performance efficiency using a temporary cloud version of Servelec Technologies’ decision support software PIONEER and the water company doesn’t intend to stop there.

The Ofwat PR19 process aims to encourage water companies to innovate and ensure that customers receive more of what matters to them at a price they are willing to pay. The challenge for all water companies is to “go significantly further” in ensuring that they are serving the public benefit by providing resilience, protecting the environment and keeping consumer bills affordable.

Bristol Water decided to meet this challenge head on by implementing the PIONEER software suite from Servelec Technologies, which provides full investment optimisation, scenario analysis and forecasting on mains bursts and other asset failures, supply interruptions and leakage.

Following successful use of PIONEER in their PR19 preparations, Bristol Water’s next step is to roll out PIONEER as business as usual, by upgrading to a full continuing licence in order to maximise the impact of the efficiencies it has already seen. In addition, Bristol Water has further invested in the Asset Risk Management Module (ARM) which provides full asset risk management capabilities. “ARM allows users to register and manually assess site-specific risks in a manner that is consistent with the modelled risks,” explained George Heywood, Technical Director for Servelec Technologies and Product Manager for PIONEER. “The power of the PIONEER optimiser can then be used to select and prioritise solutions to both the manually assessed and modelled risks, in order to develop an optimal investment programme.”

The software enables water companies to plan their investment programme to meet their own specifically configured performance targets at the minimum cost.

David Smith, Asset Management Director at Bristol Water, praised the PIONEER software suite for its integrated optimisation capabilities: “This project is part of a wider programme of change underway in Bristol Water. We’re looking to bring about a step-change in asset management capability in preparation for AMP7 and PIONEER’s impressive ability to combine and manage both modelled and manually assessed risks and interventions will be invaluable in helping Bristol Water to maximise efficiencies across the network in order to provide the best service to our customers.”

To ensure Bristol Water gains maximum value from implementation of the PIONEER and PIONEER ARM software, Servelec Technologies is also providing consultancy services to help integrate the system into business processes and to provide advice on modelling improvements. Bristol Water engineers will receive full training and the system will be fully supported by Servelec PIONEER support analysts.

Mark Hinton, Director of Business Optimisation for Servelec Technologies said: “We understand and work hard to ensure the challenges faced by our clients during PR19 are being met by our PIONEER solution. We recognise that every customer can be different but through effective collaboration our client base can be helped to share best practice and benefit from the latest innovations. Bristol Water is a great example where we have initially deployed a cloud based SaaS PIONEER version before evolving to an on premises client hosted solution which is manually configurable by the Bristol Water’s trained staff.”

Servelec Technologies is a market-leading provider of remote telemetry units, secure SCADA systems and business optimisation software providing a complete end-to-end automation and optimisation solution.

About Servelec Technologies
Servelec Technologies is a provider of SCADA and specialist software solutions, Remote Telemetry Units (RTUs), business optimisation and consultancy services to global water, utilities, transport and broadcast sectors.