NI Water Enhances Operational Efficiency Through Intelligent Robotic Process Automation

Northern Ireland Water is a Government Owned Company (GoCo), set up in April 2007 to provide the water and sewerage services in Northern Ireland.

They deliver clean, safe drinking water to approximately 840,000 households and businesses. Their customers are provided with approximately 560 million litres of good quality drinking water every day. They collect approximately 330 million litres of wastewater per day from around 669,000 households and organisations connected to the sewerage system and transfer it to a works where it is treated and disposed of safely.

Background:

As a regulated company, NI Water operates within continuous Price Control periods.  A price control covers a fixed period agreed by NI Water and our stakeholders.  Price Control (PC) is the regulatory process which determines the levels of customer bills, capital investment and company performance during the control period. The Utility Regulator makes a Determination based on a Business Plan submitted by NI Water and the funding allocations indicated by the Department for Infrastructure (DfI).

In 2007 NI Water embarked on a journey to enhance their operational efficiency through Programmes of Work linked to each Price Control period. They started with Mobile Work Management (MWM), fully embraced asset centricity, and strove to progressively improve their technology stack and the closely aligned Customer Relations Centre (CRC). Fast forward along the journey and the Planning for the Future programme set out the funding needed to achieve the PC21 (2021-2027) targets and deliverables, centred around the strategies of Economy, Nature, Water, Customer and People and to deliver efficiencies of £32m.  A key tenet of this was the establishment of the Intelligent Operations Centre bringing colleagues together to:

• Develop more personalised customer engagement
• Respond quickly and resolve issues first time, keeping customers informed along the way
• Enable our customers to contact us 24 hours a day in a way that suits them
• Excel in customer satisfaction, competing with the best customer service providers in the UK water industry and across wider sectors
• Use our data to drive improvement across all our services

A Programme of Work was established to develop in-house Robotic Process Automation capability and help deliver the efficiency targets while also mitigating against the absorption of work from other areas of the business. Candidate processes were assessed using methodologies such as Time & Motion Study to estimate the RoI and plan the projects out.  As these launched, colleagues quickly identified more and more processes that would be suitable for RPA to eliminate waste and allow us to meet our Customer targets.

Challenges and Solutions:

1. Sewer Blockages Management:

• Problem: Customers raise contacts regarding Sewer Blockages via our Customer Relations Centre.  These contacts required labour-intensive verification of property history to decide whether to dispatch contractors or conduct further root cause analysis (RCA).  About 74% of these contacts had no recent history, indicating they could be immediately dispatched to contractors.  A Time & Motion Study showed that a standard Work Order took 1.5 mins to action; an RCA took 4 mins.
• Solution: NI Water leveraged FME Workbench, using XML Templates and HTTP Callers to automate the process.  The automation had a success rate exceeding 99.999% and reduced average handling time to under one second, allowing the organisation to handle significant workloads, including 2 x severe wet weather events.
• Impact: This automation established reusable tools for future projects, reducing the workload for repetitive tasks and boosting business confidence in automated systems.

2. Valving Work Orders:

• Problem: NI Water maintain the water distribution network through reactive and proactive investigations, which require manual creation of follow-up work orders for valving operations for urgent work.  This process took up to 51.5 hours annually.
• Solution: An automated process was implemented using FME Workbench to create these work orders on a schedule.  The system filtered out any burst mains that already had related work orders and sent email notifications for situational awareness.
• Impact: Since its implementation in September 2023, the system has created over 5,500 work orders, saving approximately 46 hours, equivalent to nearly six working days of manual effort.

3. Leakage Defect Work Orders:

• Problem: NI Water relied on four contractors to report faults in the water network, submitting data in PDF form via email. Manually converting these submissions into work orders took an estimated 432 hours per year (over 52 working days approx).
• Solution: An AI-based automation was developed, utilising Power Automate and FME. This solution extracted data from the contractor-submitted PDFs and automatically created work orders. The system could run efficiently in about 20 seconds per work order.
• Impact: This automation saved 432 hours in FY 2023/24, allowing controllers to focus on more critical tasks.

Key Benefits of Automation:

NI Water’s adoption of automation, particularly using FME integrated with AI, resulted in:

• Time Savings: Thousands of hours saved annually through automated handling of repetitive work orders and customer inquiries. For example:Blocked Sewer Management: Automated incidents, saving over 1,200 hours.Valving Work Orders: Automated follow-on work orders saving nearly 46 hours.Leakage Defects: Automated creation of work orders saved 432 hours annually.
• Operational Efficiency: Faster response times, reduced manual labour, and significant cost savings.
• Scalability: The automation infrastructure has established reusable blocks that can be leveraged in future projects, supporting long-term growth.

Conclusion:

NI Water’s Intelligent Operations Centre and integration of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) have revolutionised their workflows. By addressing critical operational challenges with automation, they have not only improved response times but also significantly reduced manual workloads, allowing their workforce to focus on value-added activities. The success of these initiatives has laid a solid foundation for further automation and digital transformation in the future.