Across the UK, around 90 regulators have been established to encourage and support companies across sectors to protect customers and the environment, ensure fair competition, drive economic growth & much more.
Views on effectiveness are mixed with some seeing regulation as a key requirement to drive change & innovation, whilst others see it driving more red tape and slowing down progress across sectors.
In the UK utility sector, financial incentives are a common theme used to drive companies to align company behaviours & achieve regulatory objectives. Shelley Copsey & Jon Bentley recently shared an article on the impact of financial regulation in the water sector.
In their piece, they outline the need to use greater ‘carrot’ through collaboration, innovation and digitalisation within the sector, shifting away from the ‘stick’ of millions in fines for an already struggling industry.
In the short term at least, things won’t get any easier for water companies, with growing scrutiny, stricter regulation and more assessments of performance expected.
In 2022, the water sector across the UK alone received total fines of £522 million. The cost of inaction for these companies is staggering.
So long as severe financial penalties exist, companies must question how they can demonstrate everything they are doing to achieve compliance, drive performance and make improvements - can they hit the gold standard for regulatory assurance?
Across our customers, the common thread and the biggest challenge today, is the need to capture detailed, accurate, timely and consistent data across operations - data that is crucial to evidence and demonstrate progress towards meeting regulatory targets and achieving outcomes.
Often, we see the solutions implemented years ago can no longer provide the level of data required. The large CRM, ERP and Work Management Solutions, although they provide a significant amount of data and are absolutely critical to running and reporting on businesses, do not provide the ‘line of sight’ detail on field operations required by today’s regulation.
An additional problem that organisations face is that their data in these enterprise systems are often siloed and inconsistent, contributing to poor performance and outcomes.
Different departments work with their own datasets, which can prevent effective communication between teams. Siloed data often leads to discrepancies between different datasets, which in turn leads to difficulties in understanding trends and analysing root causes, constraining business planning and decision making.
Without the right data when and at the point something happens, how can you demonstrate your business is doing the right thing, and understand the financial impact?
As companies increasingly turn to data science, advanced analytics, and AI to address complex operational issues, the availability of trusted data – along with the ability to provide evidence and assurance for it – becomes even more critical.
FYLD is a work execution platform, which enables field workers to capture data in real time (in photos, videos or structured format), with insights and risks pushed to managers to support quick, effective action. It is the gold standard to support regulatory performance in their business.
And how do we know?
Taking the water sector in the UK as an example, data from FYLD is enabling data capture and operational improvements with a recordable and measured impact supporting regulatory performance, and usage is saving millions of pounds for those who invest the time to reimagine how to operate:
Pollution management in waste:
Southern Water recently shared the impact FYLD is having at the Spring Webinar, outlining a 37% decrease in pollution events, with video to surface issues in real-time, supported by workflows to prompt correct action. This has subsequently enabled an improved reputation with the regulator.
Across the water sector, we have mapped every water company, and identified an average of £1.2 million per company in missed value each year that could be unlocked (assuming a 5% improvement) through changing reporting & pollution response improvement using the latest OFWAT models and determinations.
Clean water performance:
In the clean water space, FYLD is being used to drive a reduction in leak runtime (duration over which a leak persists) by providing 360-degree visibility across teams handing over parts of the job.
This has enabled us to drive an average of a 2 day reduction in leak run time, and support improved understanding of work categorisation & prioritisation. Based on the latest OFWAT ODI performance models, we estimate an average of £1.5 million per company in missed value across our water customers, alongside potential CAPEX savings.
When you start to stack the impact, the potential benefits for FYLD within the water industry are massive. And of course, it’s not just water we impact. Our findings across industry can be applied to drive down emergency response times, elevate risk of ‘penalty risk events’ and surface data to understand when the risk of an incident across the network is increasing.
At a time where trust between regulated businesses and their customers and stakeholders is at a low ebb, the ability to provide evidence of operational actions, performance and outcomes in the way that is enabled by FYLD becomes a vital management tool.
So as we reach the end of this article, here’s a question for you: Regulations aren’t going anywhere - so can you afford not to do everything you can?