A window to innovation

What will the water company of the future look like and how will it operate? This was the question that inspired Anglian Water to launch its Shop Window project, which aims to use the Suffolk town of Newmarket as a live test bed for innovative products and processes. Utility Weeks speaks to the company’s director of strategic delivery and commercial Jason Tucker and Shop Window manager Fionn Boyle to find out what they have learnt.

Anglian takes the approach that the next generation of the water sector should be involved in shaping the innovation today that will become the business as usual of the future.

To that end, the Shop Window project is driven forward by a subset of the management board in collaboration with the company’s  Future Leaders Board, made up of people in the early stages of their career who have been selected for their high potential.

Tucker explains the groups were brought together to to combine the governance and experience of today’s directors working with the ambition and insights of the future management board. All the activity for the Newmarket region comes under the jurisdiction of that board.

“Leaders need to listen as much as we talk,” Tucker says. “For those of us who’ve been round the block a few times it’s so exciting to listen to not only the enthusiasm and the ambition but also the fantastic ideas that the fresh generational eyes and perspective can bring.”

This has catapulted the Shop Window to be expanded to more parts of the region, which the pair say will continue. Boyle, who chairs the Future Leaders Board, explains the project will never cease to be an incubator for ideas and a platform for innovative solutions to be trialled before rolling out in Anglian’s region as well as to other parts of the UK.

Boyle explains why Newmarket was selected: “In terms of customers it has a good socio-economic split that allows us to explore different things. From an asset base it’s discrete, so we could trial things at a small scale without causing too much disruption. Plus it has a history of innovation as the first place we’d done pressure management.”

It is an opportunity for innovative ideas to be tested at scale with real customers, assets and real challenges today to answer some of today’s questions and address future challenges. Last month the company announced the test area would grow to include more of the region taking it to around one million customers.

“Collaboration is key to what we do,” Boyle says. “With the expansion, we’re collaborating with more parts of the business, more customers, more stakeholders, none of it can be achieved just by Anglian. The Shop Window’s success is based on those who engage with it. We’re creating a platform for people to be a part of that future.”

Around 170 different projects with around 150 partners have been carried out, not all successful – but Boyle says the failures are an accepted part of the process.

“The intellectual capital of how to engage with customers and bring them along on the journey was the real success and that’s something we’ve brought across into our smart metering programme as we go. Smart metering has been another success.

“The trial at Newmarket let us get ahead of the game and understand what our customers needed.”

Tucker says an expectation on the company from its customers, regulators and stakeholders has always been to always look to the future. This must be balanced to manage the demands and expectations of present customers while making sure the right decisions are made for future generations.

“We need to be on the front foot for the region we serve and the environment we protect and enhance,” he explains. “We want to actively remove any barriers and encourage others to come along with us to test and to innovate to effectively get to that future water company operation and approach in the quickest possible time.”

This attitude has allowed the company to develop its smart water strategy – digitalisation of assets, and work with digital twins in Newmarket, which Tucker says means the company has progressed at pace.

“We’ve been able to explore through the Shop Window because of the sensors we have there and the systems to visualise that. We have four of the most highly sensitive DMAs in Europe, or in the world because of Newmarket. That level of understanding has been huge for us, our customers and our supply chain. We’ve been able to offer the platform of the Shop Window to suppliers to develop new approaches and replicate it with other water companies when they are commercially ready.”

As well as being a stage for developing technologies, it also lets the team understand better how to talk to customers, to understand them and research strategies to influence behaviour around water. This has been essential to the Love Every Drop campaign which has an aspirational per capita consumption target of 80 litres. While this was purposefully ambitious, some residents surpassed that goal and the average in the area was 104 litres per person per day, pre-Covid19.

Benefits to the wider industry of a live testbed include supply chain partners developing ideas to a commercial level that can then be shared with other companies as a case study.

Collaboration and innovation have been key themes for the sector to achieve net zero goals and solve problems such as leakage and reducing consumption and Ofwat’s innovation fund and competition has been focal to this. Last year the sector, coordinated by UK Water Industry Research (UKWIR), began plans for a water Centre of Excellence. Tucker believes the Shop Window has a crucial part to play in that.

He describes how coordination and collaboration has grown and brought the sector together in key areas of priorities. One such is process emissions in wastewater treatment, within the Shop Window area the Cambridge wastewater treatment plant, which is being redeveloped. In the revamped design there will be opportunities to put innovative processes in there with the sole process of driving down emissions, which Tucker explains will benefit the whole industry.

Taking the project even further, the company has been in discussions with the Department for International Trade to discuss making the Shop Window a way to broadcast to the world the capabilities and opportunities that the British water industry and its supply chain could potentially export.

“If anyone in the world wants to see an example of sustainable development, it’s usually a suburb of Stockholm called Hammarby where the rest of the world has for the past decade pointed their finger,” Tucker explains.

“Our ambition through the work in Newmarket, the wastewater treatment works and the contribution to further develop Cambridge, is that it will be the new Hammarby. When people ask to see world class sustainable development they will look to us. That’s how successful I’d like us to be with this.”