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.
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: