BACKGROUND
Hunter Water is a State-Owned Corporation (SOC) providing drinking water, wastewater, and recycled water services to almost 600,000 people in the Lower Hunter region, north of Sydney, Australia. From its earliest days in the 1880s, Hunter Water, like the region it serves, has grown greatly. Today, it manages more than AU$2.5 billion worth of infrastructure, including 10,000 km of water and sewer mains. The utility notes that it is constantly looking for new ways to provide great services, enable good development and be a thought leader.
TRANSFORMATION GOALS
In 2016, Hunter Water developed a new longterm strategy to improve management of infrastructure, enhance customer experience, reduce water losses and become a more resilient organisation. As part of this strategy, in 2018 Hunter Water selected TaKaDu Central Event Management (CEM) system to monitor and assist with reduction of water losses in the area.
As Hunter Water forged ahead with its long-term strategic program, including integrating the TaKaDu solution, the utility understood that it needed to adapt its operations. It set clear goals for developing its people, processes and technology – commonly known as PPT transformation.
In terms of people, Hunter Water aimed to increase collaboration across business units, foster continual learning and innovation, and, importantly, maintain a clear focus on the customer.
In parallel, Hunter Water wanted to develop new processes that would allow for flexibility and resilience in the face of a changing environment. It also aimed to institute new processes that would improve the accuracy and consistency of the network’s various data sources.
Regarding technology, Hunter Water wanted to nurture its appetite to take risks in the name of innovation and technology, to adopt new technologies and gain the full benefits of digitisation across its operations.
-Dean Palmer, NRW Business LeadTaKaDu is enabling us to transition from a leak detection approach based on suburb rate of rise to a more effective and efficient method based on DMAs and water balancing. We also see that TaKaDu has the potential to help us reduce and control non-revenue water. It adds real value to our asset management system.
Technology and Network Changes, Supported by New Procedures
As Hunter Water continued to integrate TaKaDu in its network management operations, it redefined DMAs based on best engineering practices. It modified the reflection of their water network through TaKaDu for smoother data configuration and input and created automated routines to update the TaKaDu system from the live SCADA system. The changes were reinforced through business processes, procedures and templates to ensure consistent data inputs from DMAs into the TaKaDu software.
