Compared with what?

The water industry needs effective benchmarks so that it can measure the quality and efficiency of its processes and institute best practice across the industry, says Ajay Nair.

It is intriguing, and a bit worrying, that in our business lives we’re ruled by performance indicators and benchmarks, and over the past few years we have seen the same creeping into our personal lives, be it how much we spend on energy this year compared with last year to our cars telling us we’re not driving to optimum efficiency. More and more, it seems, everything in our lives has to be compared with something or someone else.
The same could be said of the water industry. Water companies are used to being compared against each other in Ofwat league tables for different performance criteria, but can we extend the art of benchmarking performance into other areas? With the pressures to reduce operating costs, can we use benchmarking to provide both technical insights and psychological incentives to help us with these operating cost challenges? Yes we can, but only if the industry is willing to standardise its approach and adopt meaningful benchmarks that make a real difference.
While relatively successful, there is still debate in the industry about which are the right benchmarks to use, as well as how much effort and data are needed to make sure they are valid. There are many good reasons why a treatment plant cannot be benchmarked by comparison with others – different processes, consents and influents, for example. However, if the purpose of benchmarking is to galvanise improvements by showing what could be achieved, then you can only inspire this action by comparing a treatment plant with itself.
Having returned to motor sports recently, I can say from personal experience that there is nothing more inspiring than an experienced driver taking your racing car out and giving you a lap-time time you know you should be able to achieve without spending an eternity making (and blaming) set-up changes. We need to get the best out of what we have before comparing it against others.
Benchmarking is vital to drive improvements. However, those only comparing one site against another are of limited value. We need more specific targets tailored to each treatment site, giving you and your particular make of car a lap-time to aim for. Using another car analogy, if we compared our average fuel consumption against our neighbour’s, it would be meaningless unless we normalised things such as car type, journey type, traffic, number of passengers, and so on. My target is not what my neighbour’s car does, but what my car should be able to achieve.
So what are the right benchmarks for the water industry? Just focusing on energy consumption, then using kilowatt-hours per population equivalent per year is a great starting point for consumption. This is great, as long as for each actual value we provide the target value – not the best of the rest, but one that represents what is achievable. We can call this the “should be” performance.
Generally speaking for water or wastewater treatment, that value changes for each site, but also during each hour, month and season because of the impacts of so many variables. But with the power of modern computers and software, we can produce dynamic models that provide us with dynamic targets on a daily basis. Just imagine how powerful it would be if we could couple real-time measurement against real- time targets, shown in real time at a real plant to a real operator.
Currently, at best we may get real-time measurement, which is pretty much useless, especially when it is recorded 80km away from the site using it. Even more frustrating is when we measure performance and then make judgements on performance based on some measurements taken from an earlier time period. I heard the following conversations between operators and team leaders. Team leader: “How come we used more power last week?” Operator: “Because it’s been raining.” Two weeks later: “We’ve used more power again, why?”, “It’s been dry and we’ve had no rain.” These responses were both genuine and neither was said with any intent to deceive. Without understanding exactly the system, who knows what the truth actually is?
Let me give you a further example of why measurement without wisdom can lead to false conclusions. A treatment plant in the UK underwent an optimisation project on its aeration system. The improvement was measured by comparing energy consumption from the same month the previous year. When the results came back they showed a slight increase in energy consumption and so the project was declared a failure. In fact, the different wastewater temperature between the two corresponding months was such that it masked a 15 per cent reduction in energy. Without the improvements, the plant would have used even more energy.
We know that when benchmarks are publicly displayed they can deliver performance improvements. Austria, Switzerland and Germany have all produced guidance documents that set out target energy efficiency benchmarks (the best lap-times) in wastewater treatment plants.
These guidelines have been applied to sites in Australia to understand wastewater treatment performance. They have also been used to compare UK treatment plant performance and we fall short on most occasions. It is fair to say that Austria has enjoyed successful reductions in energy consumption by providing benchmarks and making it easy for operators to compare their plant against a “should be” performance as well as against their peers. We can and should do the same in the UK.
So here is a challenge for the UK water sector, its directors and chief executives. Do you really know which are your most efficient works, and can you accurately quantify how good they actually are? If we could answer these questions, then we could make real leaps forward in performance and energy usage.