IT systems supporting water industry competition 'on course' for April launch

Open Water Programme systems project moves into testing phase

The IT systems intended to support the introduction of competition in the non-household water market have been completed and have now gone into user-acceptance testing with water companies across the country.

The Central Market Operating System (CMOS) developed by CGI needs to be up, running and robust in advance of the introduction of the industry split between wholesale and retail water companies, and the introduction of competition enabling water "retailers" to offer services across the country from April 2017.

The introduction of competition to the larger household market may follow as soon as 2020.

According to Stuart Brand, partner and client director of utilities and energy at services company CGI, which is building the systems for Market Operator Services Limited (MOSL), the work has shifted into the testing phase and is on course to meet the April 2017 deadline.

At Northumbrian Water's in-house IT conference this week, 'Our Future: Learning to Fly', Brand told Computing: "We're building the central market systems on behalf of MOSL... The platform we're building will manage all the registration of which retailers 'own' which supply points, will measure the consumption - meter reading data will be sent up to the system. It will calculate the settlement charges, what each retailer owes each wholesaler for the customers that they have acquired on their patch."

He continued: "It's a multi-phase development. The bulk of the system is now complete: all the core functionality is now complete. We're now finishing off some of the reporting and market performance elements. We're through the bulk of system testing and have now moved into user-acceptance testing. So we're through the bulk of the programme.

"MOSL is our client. They are developing the capabilities for the industry, but they are owned by the water companies anyway; they are taking volunteers from the water companies to participate in testing so that there are companies like Northumbrian involved.

"There's a lot of messaging infrastructure, so all of this data about customers changing supplier, retailer, meter reading that all comes through market messaging so that has to be tested, end to end. If you're Northumbrian, you want to be sure that you can get your messages through, get processed and get your responses back.

"That's been in place for a number of months to enable water companies to build their own systems and test end-to-end," said Brand.

The software supporting the newly liberalised market has been developed by CGI, based on technology the company has already deployed in the Netherlands and Denmark. "It's based on Tibco BusinessWorks as a core platform, and we've used that as the core framework," he told Computing.

Northumbrian Water CIO James Robbins revealed today that the company had already completed a data migration for all the information it needs to provide to the MOSL database, and that it was now participating in testing.

England and Wales is not the first country in Europe to introduce competition into the non-household water market: a similar system has been up-and-running in Scotland since 2008. However, the Scottish system is much less complicated in that there is only one water company to deal with and, hence, fewer economies of scale that can be generated.