The challenge
The UK Water Industry is under unprecedented pressure. The significant increase in media and public focus on environmental performance has put the whole sector under the spotlight.
Ageing infrastructure coupled with climate and population pressure has led to an escalating environmental challenge, with overwhelming data points into pollution incidents a major challenge for water utilities, knowing where to focus resources. The UK Government is under severe pressure to reduce the 300,000 sewage spills reported in 2022 and clean up the UK’s waterways – only 14% hold a “good” ecological status. Not meeting pollution regulations can mean fines running into hundreds of millions, with the upper limit increased to £250 million in 2022.
Committed to improving environmental performance, Southern Water engaged with FYLD in September 2022. Southern Water also sought safety outcomes – they would not put environmental performance and increased work output at the expense of the safety of their workers.
They had a safety and operational transformation plan that centred around improving visibility of real-time operations to deliver performance improvement and transforming the operational and safety practices that were in place. A key driver of the engagement was to provide operational fieldworkers, the key first responder in pollution and environmental incidents, the tools and support to safely respond to minimise environmental impact.
The Solution
Southern Water partnered with FYLD to deliver a bespoke solution. They adopted FYLDs award winning AI powered site assessment, helping field-based operatives assess site conditions through computer vision and AI.
Site teams were alerted to pollution risk through FYLDs AI model, and prompted for pollution investigations. Data collected was pushed directly into the Operational Control Centre and management team – ensuring critical operational data is available live and in real-time to support decision making in extreme weather events.
In just three months, Southern Water saw impressive results. Using FYLD’s AI insights, they delivered a marked improvement in operational performance, and has led to market-leading transparency with the regulator regarding pollution incidents.
FYLD has been deployed across more than 1,000 fieldworkers who are out on the front-line responding to critical operational incidents, to keep water and wastewater services flowing.
Southern Water are seeing:
- AI identifying pollution risks on-site, notifying managers and control teams with automatic push notifications through the FYLD platform
- Remote interventions from control teams to mitigate the severity of pollution events, or prevent them entirely
- Streamlined reporting to the regulator and Environment Agency (EA) in the event of a pollution event
- Enhanced crude sampling reporting through FYLD to collect general operational data, helping benchmark water quality and identify pollution events
Proven impacts
Real-time visibility
- Over 73,000 AI powered site assessments, helping teams identify real-time safety and process risk
Smart notifications
- Over 60,000 remote interventions from managers and operational control centres – using smart notifications to intervene before problems and incidents arise
Safer operations
- Over 1,600 AI prompted pollution investigations delivered through FYLD, empowering control centres with real-time visibility
