Scottish Water provides drinking water to 2.46 million households and 150,000 business customers across Scotland. It supplies 1.34 billion liters of drinking water and removes 847 million liters of wastewater from customer properties daily, treating it before returning it to the environment. Scottish Water is embarking on transforming its operations by creating an intelligent asset base, which represents a new capability to predict and prevent issues in both water and wastewater areas before they impact customers and the environment.
THE CHALLENGE
Treating and delivering water for more than 2 million customers is an incredible task, especially in the face of rising environmental issues. In recent years, Scottish Water has witnessed the rate of climate change and its significant impact on the environment and customer lives with environmental pollution incidents and sewer chokes. Scottish Water understood that moving to a proactive and predictive approach would transform how it manages the wastewater network.
THE SOLUTION
Building on a longstanding partnership, Scottish Water leveraged Atos’s expertise in the utility sector and digital transformation skills to deliver this project. One of the key suggestions from Atos was to maximise the value of an intelligent network by targeting areas for the most beneficial deployment. The installation required a phased roll-out of intelligent network technology and leveraging data from business information modelling to assign resources effectively.
Atos was chosen as the lead partner to implement the end-to-end wastewater management project. Atos also arranged the procurement and selection of the level and flow sensors in the pilot phase. Last but far from least, Atos provided the necessary cloud integrations, system architecture, built environment and associated data processing and visualisation.
RESULTS
- Real-time wastewater network monitoring
- Ability to detect, respond and prevent incidents quickly
- Reduction in environmental pollution events and a decreased impact on customers
- Improved data outputs to align with the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency
- Operational resilience with future flow predictions
– Ally Gorst, Product Owner, WWIN Solution, Scottish WaterThe data insights from this project have already proven instrumental in helping us detect and avoid pollution incidents in the last few months. The pace of delivery has resulted in some challenges along the way, but the initiative has exceeded expectations and is delivering benefits to our customers and the environment even in its infancy.
