Innovation

Shop Window – our platform for accelerating innovation

Innovation is a key tool in our mission to keep finding new ways to look after our customers and our environment.

Our Shop Window initiative helps our people to do this by removing barriers to innovation and providing a space to accelerate innovation before it’s rolled out more widely. It’s the area of our business where our people can determine what the water company of the future could look like.

Why is it known as the Shop Window?
The term Shop Window harks from the traditional green grocer, who would put all his or her best products in their physical shop window. At Anglian Water, it refers to the fact we’re trialling all the best technologies, approaches and ways of working in the Shop Window area. When the Shop Window started in 2015, it was purely focused on technology and products, but following a recent evolution, it now takes a much more holistic approach.

A new set of priorities

Our business priorities shift to meet customer expectations and the demands on our environment. Our five year business plan to 2025 lays out what we expect to deliver and our Shop Window strategy reflects this. Our current Shop Window priorities are listed below. All projects taking place in this space will aim to generate outcomes that meet these priorities.

Resilient and intelligent water supply 
Exceed customer expectations 
Create a flourishing environment 
Tackle climate change 
Unlock efficiency 
Enable the workforce of the future

Expanded geography
The former hub of Newmarket will remain a key centre of activity alongside Cambridge. The expansion goes north to include the west coast of Norfolk and a number of towns and villages. This represents a more accurate cross section of our whole region and allows access to a much broader range of infrastructure to test innovative ideas and solutions on.

Different decision-making process

As the Shop Window is about the future of our water company, we’ve adapted the decision making structure to ensure those making the decisions will see through the process in the long term. That’s why the management board who make major decisions about the Shop Window consists of senior members of the Anglian Water board, as well as those sitting on our Future Leaders Board who are at an earlier stage in their careers.

People, process AND technology
While Shop Window started life very much technology focused, the importance of our people and the processes and approaches we develop together have become more significant. It’s important we ensure these work together – technology can only do so much without people to use the information it produces and develop the process that sits around it.

Current projects

Project FAWN

We’re currently exploring the use of Fibre Optic cables in our networks to monitor our assets, provide resilient remote control of assets and potentially provide high-speed broadband to our remote communities through partnership working.

Demonstrating Anglian Water’s commitment to bring social prosperity to the region we serve, Project FAWN is installing groundbreaking leak detection technology that uses fibre cables inside water pipes. We have over 35,000 km of infrastructure including pipes in which fibre can be laid and presents an opportunity to bring fibre optic broadband to some of the most remote areas of our region. The technology will also be used to link Anglian Water’s operational sites with more reliable high-speed transmission and improve the resilience of its telemetry and operational technology.

A trial is taking place in Ely, with the aim of supplying a small number with high-speed broadband in 2021. This project is a prime example of how we can use the Shop Window to explore what the water company of the future could deliver for our customers.

Adaptive Networks Special Interest Group

The Adaptive Networks Special Interest Group (ANSIG) has been working in collaboration to develop and implement Digital Twins for the design, build and operation of water supply systems. These are cyber-physical water distribution systems, which dynamically change connectivity, hydraulic control and operational objectives in order to improve resilience, efficiency, incident management and sustainability. A system based approach, which includes fundamental mathematical, engineering and digital transformation developments, has been adopted to dynamically optimise resource capacity, operations and assets utilisation, supporting system resilience and helping to address challenges related to climate change, environmental pressures and population growth.

The ANSIG has also enabled the organisations involved to collaborate on a digital transformation journey, which included the implementation of a unique set of Digital Twins to enable transformative changes in operational management, workforce capability and customer service.

Condition Based Maintenance

We are currently trialling different condition-based monitoring technologies on selected critical assets across both our water and water recycling sites in the Shop Window area.

These trials will help inform managers about the health and performance of their assets. The key benefits for introducing condition-based monitoring technologies are to assist in early warning before asset failure, avoid catastrophic failure of high value assets, and optimise scheduling based on urgency. Certain technologies can also help us to optimise an entire system including improving energy consumption and asset running capacity.

The outcomes we are seeing from the different trials are: reduced unplanned downtime, replacement costs, unnecessary call-outs and reduced replacement/repair costs. As we build our understanding and capabilities in this space (including CBM data analysis and integration), we hope to scale up monitoring to other parts of the region ensuring the right asset is getting the right monitoring at the right time.

These trials are an important step towards a condition-based maintenance approach where we will develop processes to ensure we see our assets through digital twins, be able to operate them remotely and ensure our people work in the most efficient ways possible.

Five-point plan for innovation acceleration

The five-point plan for innovation acceleration, the latest in a series, highlights the importance of innovation throughout the business and its supply chain, rather than as something which happens in dedicated pockets.

Operating in the driest region in the country, we anticipates water shortfalls as early as 2025 without significant action. Yet at the same time, the region’s low-lying geography and changing rainfall patterns are leading to increased risk of flooding. The escalating climate crisis is already evident in the East of England, underlining the need to find novel methods of mitigating climate change, and adapting to its impacts.

As one of the biggest energy users in the East of England, we committed in 2019 alongside the whole water industry to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2030, twenty years ahead of government targets. Population growth also poses a challenge for the business, with 175,000 new homes anticipated in the company’s region by 2025.

The plan sets out how we plan to face these challenges. It outlines Anglian Water’s track record, current work and ambitions on innovation across five key areas:

Reaching net zero by 2030
Delivering healthy rivers
Futureproofing water resources
Cutting leakage and optimising infrastructure
Adapting to climate change and building resilience to its impacts.

Anglian Water’s five-point plan for innovation acceleration

Five point plan for innovation acceleration 2022

pdf, 2.39 MB | 11 Mar 2022 DownloadFive point plan for innovation acceleration 2022

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Innovation