VAPAR and United Utilities collaborate on efficiency project and gear up for Phase 2

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VAPAR and United Utilities collaborate on efficiency project and gear up for Phase 2

In September 2019, VAPAR became one of 8 companies who were selected by United Utilities to take part in their second Innovation Lab, facilitated by L Marks, an investment and innovation advisory firm. United Utilities are one of the biggest water companies in the UK – for some context, their network size is roughly 3 times the size of Sydney Water which is arguably one of the largest water utilities in the southern hemisphere.

Over 100 ideas were submitted to take part in United Utilities’ second innovation lab, with only 8 making it through the selection process from the ideas phase to the innovation lab. The other 7 companies who were selected to take part were:

The lab was structured as 10 weeks with the opportunity to co-locate in the United Utilities offices in Warrington to get to know the business units, use cases and processes in as much detail as was needed to provide value add solutions. To make the most out of this opportunity, VAPAR CTO, Michelle Aguilar, attended the lab for the full duration. Since this was United Utilities’ second innovation lab, they had buy-in from all stakeholders up front. Prior to the lab commencing, the United Utilities innovation leads had undertaken a significant amount of ground work, understanding who could be impacted, which key staff members should be involved, and how much time might be needed from the staff to make the lab as successful as possible for each team. The day the lab commenced, there was a 2 hour project meeting held to raise all concerns, voice desired outcomes, potential blockers and to ensure the assembled team were the right people to be involved. Meetings were set up with people on the ground to explain how the existing process works within the multiple business units, and also the contractors they work with. We were able to go out on site with UU contractors on multiple occasions which provided the opportunity for us to map out the processes undertaken end to end and understand where potential efficiencies could be found. We delivered a report based on these findings to the UU Transformation team on how the end to end process works and what actions could be taken to improve it. This report also detailed how VAPAR’s automated defect detection system could be integrated to provide objective third party assessments in a fast, scalable, centralised way to benefit both UU and their contractors. United Utilities provided VAPAR with a significant dataset to prove and improve the accuracy of VAPAR’s automated defect detection system. This huge volume of data provided us with the opportunity to develop and test ways in which the dataset could be curated in a scalable manner, and used to validate the accuracy of our system in accordance with the UK standard, the MSCC (Manual of Sewer Condition Classification), written by the WRc (http://wrcplc.co.uk/). United Utilities facilitated a meeting for VAPAR with Peter Henley from the WRc to discuss the need for a way to accredit software like ours to the MSCC. Since the lab, United Utilities has taken the lead on driving the industry towards software accreditation to the standard, and VAPAR and WRc have worked together to develop such a specification. VAPAR had originally defined AI models to align with the Australian standard (WSA-05), and has since aligned its model outputs with the MSCC (UK standard) among others.

Through this process, VAPAR were able to make improvements to the AI models augmented by UU’s CCTV footage, gain insights on model performance across different datasets, achieve alignment with multiple standards, identify and understand several additional business use cases for the system, understand where our platform could fit into the end to end processes, and what additional capabilities we needed to add to streamline usage. VAPAR are now pleased to announce we will be continuing to work with United Utilities! Phase 2 of the Innovation Lab project is due to kick off in May and will be focused around:

  • Integrations to streamline process flow and optimise scheduling
  • Usability to increase visibility of data and improve process experience
  • Speed to provide quicker turnaround in multiple business units and keep customers happy
  • Accuracy and further granularity in defect classifications to improve data insights

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Read more about case study with the United Utilities here.

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