Introduction
United Utilities is Northwest England’s water company that keeps the taps flowing for three million homes and 200,000 businesses across the region. It is also the UK’s first water company to significantly enhance its service to customers and streamline operations — using Blue Prism’s Robotic Process Automation platform.
The need for digital innovation England & Wales regulator, Ofwat, asserts that the water services sector is an analog industry operating in a digital world. United Utilities has responded emphatically to that claim by making major, strategic investments to allow it to become a leading digital company that can thrive amongst its peers. The company is the first UK utility to embrace RPA to drive digital innovation and generate efficiencies across its operations. This investment is an important part of United Utilities’ digital strategy and is also playing a significant role in modernizing its water and wastewater network too.
“Part of becoming a digital company in a digital world is to ensure that we’re not just a collection of independent components, but a single, cohesive, business – with an end-to-end system that delivers the best service to our customers. Technology and digitization are a key part of that, and RPA is one of the foundation technologies of this strategy,” said Genevieve Wallace Dean, Head of Robots at United Utilities.
Surging forward with RPA United Utilities started its RPA journey in November 2017 after selecting Blue Prism as its connected-RPA partner since it offered enterprise strength, security, auditability and scalability capabilities. Leading this initiative is Genevieve Wallace Dean, who took on the role of establishing a robotic process automation capability – as well as creating a digital automation team of 10 – to focus on RPA and app development, which is then filtered through the business.
The digital automation team has built an RPA delivery infrastructure, including training Digital Workers and people, while defining where the applied technology could be most beneficial. This operational strategy is geared towards system thinking, so the company can better understand how changes impact its business – as well as its digital plans. So far, United Utilities is 18 months into its journey and has already automated 30 processes using RPA-enabled Digital Workers – currently with another five in development.
“Despite the reduction in manual processes, no cuts have been made to the workforce. It has enabled our human agents, who would have been sending those texts, to spend more time engaging with the customers. Cutting the workforce has never been an objective of RPA. If there is a task that doesn’t need intelligence and business knowledge, automation is applied to it,” said Wallace Dean.
The Creation of an RPA Team: A Timeline
- United Utilities started its RPA journey in November 2017
- Created a digital automation team of 10
- Currently automated 30 processes using RPA-enabled Digital Workers…
- …with another five in development
RPA in Action
Managing appointment requests
The first process to be automated was sending text messages to United Utilities’ customers when an engineer is due to visit them. This involves Digital Workers accessing applications and seeing who has an appointment, then sending them a text notification. With about 200 messages sent out daily, it previously took eight people, covering different areas, to manually work the process. Now, one Digital Worker spends 30 minutes a day on this process – which has saved an estimated 2,000 hours a year through this project alone. The Digital Worker is then freed up to work on other process automations in the queue.
While time savings are easy to measure, other benefits are being experienced that include increased accuracy and logging, so United Utilities knows that text messages have been sent, when they were sent, and to whom.
Accelerating Free Home Meter Applications
Automation has also been applied to the process where customers request to have their water usage metered. This process has spikes in demand, which makes it difficult to employ the right number of staff resources. Digital Workers accept water meter applications, do calculations and then progress them. More Digital Workers are deployed on the job when there are spikes in demand – so no extra resources are required.
Fault Detection and Resolution
With utility companies keen to stop water leakage, identifying problems early is essential, so United Utilities applies RPA to fault detection and resolution. Digital Workers can be applied almost anywhere, and the company is working on a proof of concept to get them to perform more predictive work and monitor more consistently.
Improved Reporting Data Efficiency
Reporting operational data is another area where significant efficiencies have been gained by the company through RPA. This activity was previously carried out by eight people, contributing to a report that’s produced four times a day and took 720 minutes of manual daily effort. It’s now automated through RPA and takes just 32 minutes a day. The value of this was displayed during a dry weather period in summer of 2018. The company had to monitor and report on operations more often and increased the number of reports to nine per day. RPA enabled it to do this without having to use more people.
“Using automation delivers many benefits for us—like reducing process time from days to minutes—and being able to respond much more quickly to problems in the network that cause customer inconvenience. But the clearest measure of success is being voted number one in our industry for customer service – which is great news for the seven million people in the North West that receive our services. RPA also allows the great people we employ more time to focus on delivering great customer service too,” added Wallace Dean.
Moving RPA Forward
There has been a positive reaction by United Utilities’ staff to their new digital colleagues – especially once these individual teams have seen the processes go live and they understand how they’ll work together better. The company has been focusing on mature, high-volume and repetitive processes – as these are proving the best suited to automation.
To sustain its RPA journey, the digital automation team wants people within business units, who are also ideally placed to help, to really understand and embrace the value of RPA. The team is going out and building relationships across the business with those people who can best identify processes to be automated.
United Utilities leads the way in RPA adoption across its industry and is clearly demonstrating that it’s embracing digital innovation. Although this is just the start of the company’s journey, it now has the connected platform to exploit more automation opportunities to further transform operations – and add greater value to both the business and its customers.
“It is up to people in the business to put their hand up and say, ‘I think I have something here’. It’s all about business engagement… while we implement RPA for processes in certain departments, they usually come up with other ideas,” commented Wallace Dean.
To learn more about how Blue Prism RPA can work for your organization, contact us today!
