A multi-faceted approach

The drive to improve productivity is a perennial challenge. Tricky in any industry, it’s fiendishly complex in the utility sector, where enhanced productivity translates to meeting evolving customer and stakeholder needs, delivering high-quality services, tightly controlling costs, and complying with ever stricter regulations, all while ensuring a healthy return on investment.

Worse still, recent economic headwinds have made achieving these goals more challenging. Historically, high energy prices, stubbornly high inflation, and higher borrowing costs put significant pressure on budgets.

In this environment, “business as usual” simply isn’t enough. Water companies need to find new and more productive ways of working.

So, what do we mean when we talk about productivity?

Traditional notions of productivity often focus on a single metric, like cost reduction. However, in the dynamic environment of the water industry, a more nuanced understanding is essential.

Productivity isn’t just about doing more with less (although that’s certainly part of the picture); it’s about optimising the entire value chain to deliver enhanced services, ensure long-term sustainability, and create lasting value.

But how do you deliver this? Here, we outline a three-point plan to help you start on the path to enhanced productivity.

1. Measure what truly matters – moving beyond “Jobs Per Day”

The key to improved productivity is measuring what matters. So, before you embark on an improvement programme, you must ensure you have an effective means of measuring productivity.

While traditional metrics like “Jobs Per Day” (JPD) offer a basic overview of productivity, they fail to capture the whole story. Indeed, they may even be dangerously misleading; improving JPD doesn’t directly translate to more output and enhanced productivity.

By implementing more sophisticated KPIs, water companies can better understand their teams’ contributions and identify areas for improvement.

Here are some alternative approaches that move beyond a narrow focus on cost-cutting and output recording:

  • Work order completion: Track the completion rate of work orders relative to the resources used (e.g. labour, materials). This provides a clearer picture of operational efficiency and the value delivered by field teams. [Top-Tip: But be careful – if you’re looking at average completion times, the mean can often be skewed by outliers. The median or quartile completion time offers a more accurate and actionable representation of opportunities.]
  • Standardised vs. actual job time: Comparing planned work times with actual completion times and driving better compliance enhances scheduling accuracy and resource allocation and improves ‘tool time’. Again, ensure you understand the impact of skew and outliers.
  • Quality metrics: Incorporate error, rework, and reattendance rates of work delivered to measure effectiveness. Reduced rework signifies skilled execution, a robust process, and truly improved productivity. [Top tip: Analyse for weak spots where multiple technicians have attended clusters of assets.]

2. Identify your Productivity drivers and levers

Once you’ve stress-tested your metrics to ensure they’re giving you the most accurate picture possible, you need to look at your organisation’s unique productivity levers to identify where you have scope for improvement. This requires a keen understanding of your operations. Here’s a framework to get you started:

  • Process efficiency analysis: Identify bottlenecks and areas of waste within your workflows. Look for opportunities to streamline processes, eliminate redundancy, and leverage automation. [Top Tip: Ensure you are measuring Work In Progress (WIP) in your critical process steps so you can focus improvement efforts on the bottlenecks.
  • Skills gap assessment: Evaluate your workforce’s skillsets against the demands of AMP8 compliance and your directorate goals. Identify areas where upskilling or reskilling programs can empower your teams to work smarter and achieve more. For example, assess how knowledgeable and skilled your wastewater teams are at Nature Based Solution (NBS) in condition-based monitoring and maintenance.
  • Technology enablement audit: Assess your current technology landscape to identify gaps and opportunities. Explore solutions to automate/streamline tasks and improve data collection and analysis. [Top Tip: Can you use video apps to minimise site visits to undertake inspection activities requiring follow-up work.]

3. Review reporting and governance

Appropriately used, KPIs can drive collaboration, accountability, and progress towards your goals. Data is weaponised when used poorly, leading to unproductive organisational blame games. Here’s how to set the right KPIs for your organisation:

  • Focus on outcomes, not outputs: Don’t just measure activity; measure its impact. KPIs should reflect the critical drivers of progress (lead) and achieving desired outcomes for each function (lag). Top Tip: Lead and Lag indicators are relative to a departmental objective.
  • Cascade KPIs: Develop a hierarchy of KPIs that flow from organisational objectives to individual team and even employee levels, ensuring everyone is working towards the same goals. Top Tip: Straight disaggregation of KPIs can work for financial metrics (budgets can be readily sliced and diced) but not for process metrics—here, use causal driver-tree analysis.
  • Set the right KPIs for the right people: Productivity is a team effort, but often, the focus is on the frontline teams to improve Jobs per Day, but they don’t control all the levers. Poor work planning and over-promoted work orders kill productivity but are outside the control of frontline teams. Measuring activities that teams can influence is critical to ‘buy-in’ and moving the dial. [Top Tip: Measuring frontline teams on completion of quality work within standard task times is a powerful measure of productivity.] Planners can be measured by minimising ‘plan white space’ and travel time, and maintenance specialists can set an accurate planning duration.

Go beyond the basic (but fundamental) concept of setting ‘SMART KPIs’ and devise them tailored to each team’s unique role and contribution. Doing so can foster a culture of collaboration and accountability and empower your workforce to identify and drive productivity improvements.

Moving beyond the numbers

It’s time to redefine what productivity means for the AMP8 era.

Water companies can unlock productivity gains by recognising the limitations of traditional metrics and embracing a multifaceted approach. This shift empowers you to not only achieve regulatory compliance but also build a more efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective water operation for the long term. This future is achievable if you take action and transform your approach to productivity now.

Ready to unlock your organisation’s full potential? Contact Reson8 today to learn how we can help you implement these strategies and turbocharge your productivity – dean.wheeler@reson8.group