Internal operational improvements

Thames Water are one of the oldest water utility companies in the UK with a vast area spanning from the edges of Hampshire to the east of London. Thames have had a lot of negative press recently and have banded together a team through Equal Experts to create a new Android application to help keep their sewage treatment works compliant.

Thames Water is governed by the Environmental Agency and new legislation was passed to have all information about sewage systems and their network digitalised. The current system was paper based at over 500 sites with varying degrees of usage.

The project was initially a 12 week pilot/ proof of concept with possibilities after of improving the platform. Within the first 12 weeks we shadowed users of the product and identified the pain points and areas where the app could make their lives easier on a day to day.

All features that we built on this product were identified through the end users giving this platform a level of recognition throughout the business making discussions and uptake much easier throughout the project.

This later transpired into nominations and awards for the product library constructed.

It became clear that keeping the android application as a dedicated workflow app would be key in it’s usage and success. Especially given the wide number of user groups that would be accessing the tool on a daily basis.

Creating a multi view dashboard outside the android application would allow the various users to have a bespoke view of the information they needed. With this dashboard we could now give real-time performance data on sites maintenance and users performance allowing any major issues to be resolved without a substantial delay.

Thames Water deal with both fresh water systems and waste water. The EMS platform was constructed to be portable to any section of Thames workflows. Thames then instructed the team to begin working on both Fresh water and Leak detection solutions.

We followed the same pattern and yet again the team and product was nominated with awards.

The EMS platforms success was based on listening to users and proactive addressing their concerns. The platform has a 99% uptake rate with internal staff members and helped reduce the maintenance burdens on assets by 40%. The product was also suggested to by the Environmental agency to Southern Water and Infinity Water as a possible solution.