As water service provider Anglian Water approaches ten years in its partnership with Copperleaf, the ERP Today TV news team, Mark Vigoroso and Stephanie Ball talk with Sefan Sadnicki, managing director EMEA and APJ for Copperleaf, and John Green, strategic value manager at Anglian Water, to hear how the partnership continues to create value.
When Anglian Water first signed on with Copperleaf, one of the goals was to be able to offer a two percent greater customer value, equating to £50m for customers after a course of five years.
Speaking as a guest on the ERP Today News desk, nestled in the bustle of the IFS Unleashed expo hall, John Green explains: “When we originally set out those numbers, that was based on a two percent capital efficiency on the program as the size it was ten years ago. Our capital investment program is now four times the size moving into our next regulatory period, and we are still seeing those sorts of efficiencies being generated as a result of the prioritization and optimization that the Copperleaf platform allows us to do.”
Taking through the process of evaluating different investment options at Anglian Water, Green says: “In our business plan, we’re looking at our current performance levels versus where we’d like those levels to be. We’re also looking at the sentiment of our stakeholders, including our customers and our regulators about where they’d expect to see performance improvements and what they are willing to pay for those improvements.
“We can generate a series of different solution options, and then Copperleaf helps us to determine the best cut of investments and alternatives that then helps us to build up our plan that we submit to our regulator.”
The unique aspects of Anglian Water’s investment planning process come from the level of knowledge in-house around the water service provider’s cost base, with Green claiming an “industry-leading” edge, he explains: “That’s based on a number of years of taking actual costs from previous projects and building up complex cost models. That gives us real confidence that when we’re going to our regulator and saying, we think this is going to cost ‘x’ amount, we are really confident in what ‘x’ means.”
The company’s value framework is another leading win in Green’s mind, allowing it to express benefits and disbenefits in a common language and equate that to the money spent.
“We’ve built a value framework which allows us to value things like flooding a customer’s property, or interrupting a supply of water alongside things like traffic disruption, well-being improvements or health and safety. So we’ve got some really good tools from the cost side, but also the benefits side,” says Green.
What’s next for the partnership?
From Copperleaf’s Sadnicki, ERP Today hears whether this decade-long partnership is still driving value, and what is on the innovation horizon for the partnership.
“More recently we’ve done some really interesting work around climate change, and understanding how assets are going to be affected by climate change,” Sadnicki shares.“We have wetter winters, drier summers, and that’s causing the degradation rates that we’ve been using for a long time to change. So, using the Copperleaf predictive analysis capability, looking at different scenarios, we can predict what investment is going to be needed in the future.”
ESG gains have been an ongoing work in progress for this partnership, with a focus both on the governance and environmental factors at hand.
Sadnicki says: “Understanding the carbon impact, the cost modeling that we’ve done together incorporates a lifecycle view of the carbon requirements for firstly to build the infrastructure, but also the lifecycle requirements for operating that infrastructure.”
Capital carbon, the carbon involved in the creation of the asset in the first place, was baselined by Anglian Water in 2010 and, now, Anglian Water claims a 61 percent reduction against that baseline.
“It’s a real, significant change. It’s the data that’s been available through systems like Copperleaf that really helped us to understand that and measure it,” shares Green. “Carbon savings often come with cost savings as well, so it’s a win-win. Which is why having a value framework that considers different types of value is really important, so you can start to deliver not only financial value but natural value, social value, people value, you know there are lots of different areas to look into.”
Anglian Water has a host of enterprise asset management technology providers in its stack, including IBM and SAP, so given the change of the recent IFS acquisition of Copperleaf, and the announcements at IFS Unleashed, is the water service provider tempted to jump ship on any technology commitments?
Spelling out the next few years Sadnicki shares his excitement at the ongoing development to come from the IFS acquisition of Copperleaf: “It’s going to help us accelerate our roadmap, and that’s across many different aspects. We’ve got exciting new features around Risk Management that John and the Anglian Water team are interested in. Also being able to integrate with the variety of systems that Anglian Water use, but also with the other IFS solutions.”
Risk Manager is said to enable the capture of emergent operational risks that might require a capital investment solution, and for Green, “It would allow us to prioritize those alongside known planned risks and provide real visibility for our field staff in terms of where that risk is for a process prioritization that makes sense. So, they’ve got visibility of what’s going on and it’s not just disappearing into a black hole that is forgotten about and leads to some kind of asset failure or performance issue.”
It’s a long partnership full of future promise for Copperleaf and Anglian Water and Sadnicki concludes: “I think what we’ll see is IFS Copperleaf being the first end-to-end asset lifecycle planning solution that is going to be considerable benefit to the market.”
