Welsh Water filters in SAP asset management

Hopes to gain single view of information

Welsh Water is finalising an SAP implementation that it hopes will help improve the management of its £14bn of assets.

The utility company already uses SAP to manage its financials and human resources, but was having trouble obtaining a single view of its assets, which inhibited making more-informed management decisions.

'Before we had SAP within the company, we couldn't bring all of the information about our assets together. We had an asset database, which recorded the basic details. We had a number of areas where we had plant maintenance, which ran on a different IT system, and we also had our financials,' said IT and data strategy manager Gill Busby.

By implementing the asset management applications, Welsh Water and its partners will obtain a real time, integrated and customised view of all relevant asset data, including reservoirs, water treatment plants, sewage pumping stations and water mains.

'This will help us implement a maintenance strategy based on current knowledge of our assets and their performance. It will also make us able to understand the cost of operating assets at a detailed level,' said Busby.

The project started in January when LogicaCMG and SAP Consulting started the installation of three mySAP products covering product lifecycle management, enterprise portal and business intelligence.

'The implementation finished in mid-September. We've been taking bits live over the past three weeks and are now concentrating on feeding data into the system, which we hope to have done by the end of the year,' she said.

Welsh Water serves 1.2m household customers and more than 110,000 business customers, supplying an average 900m litres of water every day through a network of 26,800km of water mains and 620 pumping stations.