Since our inception, we’ve worked with some of the biggest players in the water industry. Our collaborative approach to projects has enabled us to build strong and long-lasting relationships.
Through these partnerships, we’ve got to grips with the day-to-day concerns of network and performance managers, tailored our data analysis services and created robust solutions to real problems. See who we work with and how they’ve helped us take our projects to the next level.
As our ‘local’ client we have a strong relationship with United Utilities’ leakage team and have supported them across a variety of projects. Working with them to develop Paradigm through their third Innovation Lab was a particular highlight for us, and we enjoy their openness and strong approach to collaboration.
With a good proportion of our senior team hailing from Northumbrian Water’s catchment area, this client holds a special place in our hearts. We founded our pressure management approach through collaboration with their excellent network analysis team, and they planted the very first Paradigm shaped seed with us back at Innovate East in 2019.
One of SME Water’s longest standing clients, and the original development partners for our Dynamo analysis. With such a large and varied data set, we enjoy including Severn Trent Water within our analysis projects.
One of the original four members of the Paradigm club project, Anglian Water’s high smart meter penetration and low background leakage levels have delivered fantastic insights for the development of Paradigm.
Working with South Staffordshire PLC over the past few years we developed our pressure management analysis capabilities in such a way as to give rise to the development of Dynamo, whilst identifying some great network improvements for them to implement.
A key partner for Dynamo, Yorkshire Water is committed to innovation, sustainability and the advancement of best practices within the UK water industry.
The feedback from the team was really positive, they found the sessions informative and interactive and got a lot from the training. I have also sat down with our training team to show them bit and pieces of the Paradigm Academy and they are pleased that this has been rolled out to the control group and it has sparked some ideas on how we need to change our training for our field technicians. We are keen to put the rest of our work force through Paradigm Training.
My new starter mentioned how useful the academy was. He’s brand new to the industry so it’s definitely given him the building blocks that we can build upon with further training.
The response in our organisation has been really positive. We are still at the beginning of a journey but the Paradigm club project is already providing better insights and decisions.
The collaboration between different water companies is really good. Its been great to share ideas and we take a lot away from the sessions.
Its about the way we’ve work together on the solution. We feel engaged in the results and it gives our analysts the confidence to really go after leakage in areas where previously it might have been dismissed as demand.
This is probably one of the most engaged trials we’ve delivered at Yorkshire Water. The concept is really simple, the analysts, the team leaders, engineers, the inspectors and are all really on board with the solution.
The response in the organisation has been really positive. While we are still at the start of the journey, we’re already starting to use it (Paradigm) as part of our weekly and monthly tactical escalation calls.
The Paradigm model and workstreams helped us in how best to target this DMA and, as a result, we highlighted issues with our current records, helping us find potentially 60.5m3 per day.
I think the way it’s been done is really good. There’s a clear aim, a clear vision and the way the club project has been split out into the technical aspect and the strategic aspect has been really good.
The acoustic analysis, reports have helped me by reducing the amount of time spent manually searching through DMA deployments. Manually reviewing each individual DMA and/or loggers is time consuming and repetitive, but having reports which direct me straight to an alarm not only saves me time, it allows me to use it effectively elsewhere. The Logger Status Report allows us to quickly check which loggers require further analysis and has significantly reduced the amount of manual work needed to track repairs.
Paradigm identified a seasonal variation in this DMA with the early summer demand increase as well as Ramadan impact. The three allotments highlighted were previously unidentified and after investigation, could well be causing a lot of the seasonal variation. Several private leaks were also located on the back of the analysis. This DMA has had a stubborn night flow for a long time and this work has helped to suggest why and find some of the unaccounted-for water here.
SME Water joined our innovation accelerator programme (our “Innovation Lab”) in 2020-21 with the idea of using flow data from our network meters to identify patterns and discern whether the flow is consumption/usage or leakage/losses. Through the work we found the approach (now known as “Paradigm”) could provide great insight, helping us to better understand demand patterns and target our leakage reduction activities more effectively. We continue to work with SME Water and the wider industry in our efforts to achieve a 15% reduction in leakage by 2025 and halve leakage levels by 2050. Innovations, like Paradigm, are critical enablers for achieving these commitments.
“The project outputs are exactly what I wanted. You’ve succeeded in identifying opportunities in Cambridge where other companies have failed, and I’m looking forward to implementing the schemes.”
