Yorkshire Water has appointed The Oakland Group to an AMP7 contract to ensure customers benefit from data innovation and new technology.

The Leeds-based data consultancy will work closely with Yorkshire Water’s team to use data to enable smarter network and customer operations while delivering the right foundations and capabilities for the future.

The multi-year contract will see data used across critical elements of the organisation, including customer engagement, leakage management, operational improvement, and internal facing departments.

It builds on an existing relationship that has seen the two organisations develop a new Cloud Telemetry platform, which ingests millions of data points from multiple in-house and third-party operational technology systems at speed and introduces common data models.

Yorkshire Water and The Oakland Group also worked together to develop a new bio-resource model (BRM), which reduced costs around the bio-resource management process. The data was used to simulate a wide range of variables over a 40-year timeframe. It was determining potential scenarios for the future that allowed longer-term opportunities to be identified for a more efficient and effective service.

Lee Harris, head of technology change at Yorkshire Water, commented:

“Data has become increasingly important to how we operate as an organisation. It’s at the heart of everything we do, but there’s more we can achieve with it, so we are taking a more strategic approach to how it’s captured, managed, shared and used to help everyone do things better. We are working with the team at Oakland Group to develop this ambition and seek to build long-lasting data capabilities that will form the bedrock of how we operate for many years to come.”

The partnership will develop and improve data across all aspects, including architecture, governance and management. With a wide, complex operation, data can be a key enabler in driving efficiency and improving the customer experience.

Yorkshire Water aims to improve the use of data within the whole organisation by the end of the current Asset Management Period AMP7. With greater expectations from OFWAT heading into the upcoming AMP8 period, it is preparing for a data-enabled future.

Andy Crossley, technical director at The Oakland Group, said:

“This is a programme of significant importance to one of the largest water companies in the UK. We are pleased to be going on this journey with Yorkshire Water, and as a resident of Yorkshire, I can personally see the impact it will have. Whilst the programme seeks to develop a company-wide data-centric approach, and we are working with the internal teams to create real outputs that can be used to improve the customer experience and operational efficiency today.”