Operational resilience

The Engineering and Asset management team, in collaboration with the Cost Assessment team, are working on a joint programme to enhance asset health understanding across the water sector. Some of the key workstreams include:

  • Asset health data collection where condition data is requested and methodologies are developed to understand current asset condition in the sector.
  • A pilot to develop forward-looking asset health metrics in line with Ofgem’s NARMs approach which looks at monetised risk, Probability of Failure, & Consequence of Failure.
  • Developing an asset inventory that allows the sector to map their individual inventories into a common inventory.

Find out more about these joint programmes.

Operational resilience is the ability of an organisation’s infrastructure, and the skills to operate that infrastructure, to avoid, cope with and recover from disruption in its performance. It is about reducing the probability of water supply interruptions and wastewater flooding, as well as mitigating the impact of any disruption through efficient handling, good communication and quick recovery.

It also means long-term resilience to environmental pressures, demographic change, shifts in customer behaviour and the impacts of climate change.

Across society and the world, recent years have been increasingly defined by rapid, often unexpected, change in a number of areas. Events and developments appear to be becoming more uncertain with time. Technology is rapidly evolving, knowledge is expanding, networks are broadening, disruptive weather events are becoming more frequent, and the consumer is ever-more empowered. This has significant implications for the water sector.

Maintaining and improving operational resilience requires companies to identify and manage a complex range of risks to make sure their assets operate effectively to meet current and future service needs. This includes the successful management of long-life assets and operational systems on a day-to-day basis while also ensuring mitigations are in place to manage the impact of low probability, high impact events. These core company activities are vital to customers but may not be visible to them or to wider stakeholders.

This strategy will be delivered through focused engineering and asset management workstreams

Engineering And Asset Management Workstreams

In our strategy we signalled our intention to focus on improvements to operational resilience and asset management. This has been reinforced through our collaborative work with the sector on the Asset Management Maturity Assessment (AMMA), License Condition Development, Operational Resilience framework, Integrated Monitoring, Asset Health and Leakage.

Our longer-term ambition is to help the sector to adapt to future challenges and continue to deliver better outcomes for customers and the environment. To achieve this, we propose to evolve our monitoring approach to provide a richer picture and different levels of granularity of operational resilience for customers and stakeholders.

Our proposed approach can be found in detail via various workstreams.