enterprise application development
Anglian Water makes extensive use of Investment Manager and a set of integrated enhancements allowing seamless feedback from project outturn costs to the cost estimation process.
"This new Cost Estimation approach for investment projects is industry leading across the water and wider utility industry sectors, and is a major breakthrough for the water industry."
- Nomination for Supplier Innovation of the Year award 2009
Anglian Water are customers of our Investment Manager application. A total of around 350 users make use of one or more of the functions provided by Investment Manager or the additional components that comprise the application suite.
We've developed a range of additional functionality within the standard Investment Manager application to meet their specific requirements for asset costing, historical cost analysis and automated solution generation.
Automated solution generation is used to assess and filter large volumes of modelled risk data and to choose appropriate potential investments from a menu of standard interventions. These choices are made according to a set of rules under the control of the application's users.
The Cost Estimation module allows the automated estimation of asset-based work via user-defined decision trees. These analyse the characteristics of an asset and thereby determine the most appropriate cost model. This has allowed the automated estimation of tens of thousands of individual assets in a transparent and auditable way. As improved cost models become available, solutions can be recosted automatically.
In addition to capital costs, the system also produces estimates for operational costs based on a set of standard models and variables, and generates Carbon costs for each solution.
Historical Cost Analysis is used to perform complex statistical analysis of project out-turn costs, assessing correlations between asset characteristics and job cost to derive cost models for future work. This allows feedback from actual work undertaken to drive successively more accurate cost estimation.
Investment Manager's core functionality is then used to assess very large numbers of costed potential investments in order to provide a programme of asset interventions by year.
Working closely with the business, our work contributed significantly to Anglian Water's submission to OFWAT for the PR09 regulatory period and led to our being awarded (jointly with our partners ICS Consulting) the Supplier Innovation Award for 2009.
A recent addition was the Cost Capture module. This fully-integrated bespoke component allows Anglian Water's contracting partners to deliver actual outturn costs for programmed work, recorded at the level of individual assets, directly into the system. This completes the feedback loop from cost curve -> costed intervention -> project implementation and back to the statistical base from which the models are derived - all within a single application.
Anglian Water is one of the UK's largest water utilities, delivering water and wastewater services to more than six million domestic and business customers in the east of England and Hartlepool.
Nearly 4,000 employees and a network of contracting partners work together to deliver almost 1.1 billion litres of water to their customers every single day.