Wessex Water has announced the launch of its new Marketplace platform, an online collaboration tool for organisations to participate in from both inside and outside of the water sector.
The innovative platform for organisations both inside and outside of the water industry presents challenges the water company is looking to solve, and any data associated with them, inviting others to offer a potential solution.
Wessex Water commented:
“The first-of-its-kind website for the water industry will underpin our open systems approach in our business plan, where we aim to be more transparent with our customers, supply chain and the rest of the industry. We believe this strategy will lead to a better service and better value for customers.”
As part of the launch, the utility has released two initial challenges and datasets on the Marketplace website:
- reducing phosphorous levels in the Hampshire Avon river catchment – in addition to its existing workstreams, Wessex wants to hear any other suggestions for how it could reduce P levels in certain areas of the catchment and is interested in working with partners to fund additional P reduction measures.
- replacing analogue Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) services across its sites, which will be redundant by 2025 – Wessex has 2800 telemetry sites that rely on analogue PSTN services to communicate back to its central control systems.
Group chief innovation officer David Elliott explained that the Marketplace has been designed to come up with alternative ways of managing water and waste, outside of the traditional asset-focused approach.
“For too long the water industry has operated in silos and whenever a challenge or target comes along, the first thing we immediately do is think of what asset we can build to make it right.”
“We, like all other water companies, have a lot of performance commitments to achieve during the next AMP. The outdated practice of building and operating all our own assets without any interaction with the wider market could prevent us from meeting some of these commitments.
“Asset solutions can’t achieve everything we need to deliver at an affordable cost, or without consuming more carbon. Through the Marketplace we will be able to engage and collaborate with other organisations such as NGOs, charities, local authorities, energy companies and community groups to solve our problems in a more holistic and sustainable way.”
We’ll be holding two information sessions so you can hear more about what we’d like to do and how we want to engage. We’ll give an overview of the performance commitment, more information on what we’re already doing, how we want to work with partners and the process for engaging, with the opportunity for you to ask us questions."
Wessex Water is holding the information sessions in May on its phosphorous removal challenge to provide an overview of the performance commitment, more information on what it is already doing, how it wants to work with partners and the process for engaging. Attendees will also have the opportunity to ask questions.
The Marketplace is now live - to see the first two challenges visit marketplace.wessexwater.co.uk
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