Linking asset maintenance to financial reporting for a water operator

What is shaping water

Water research covers households, utilities, purifier brands and development programmes. Access, quality, reliability and trust in the source decide how people use and pay for water.

• Many households combine several water sources
• Trust in water quality drives purifier adoption
• Utilities are judged on reliability and billing

A private water treatment operator, working in Tamil Nadu & Telangana. Client identity is withheld to protect confidentiality.

Organisation

A private water treatment operator

Sector

Water

Team engaged

IT & Development

Services

MIS & financial reporting, ERP development, Data analytics & dashboards

The operator ran plants under long-term contracts but could not see maintenance costs by plant and asset, making contract renewals and pricing difficult. Some plants were consistently over budget, but the reasons were buried in general maintenance accounts.

• Deliver on the brief: linking asset maintenance to financial reporting for a water operator.
• Design around the real needs of treatment plants.
• Define requirements and success criteria the solution would be tested against.
• Deliver a reliable, secure solution the team can run and extend.

The work focused on 12 treatment plants.

• treatment plants12

Audiences we typically reach in water

HouseholdsUtility customersPurifier buyers and ownersCommunity water committeesWASH programme beneficiaries

Coverage: Tamil Nadu & Telangana. Market: India.

• India

An iterative delivery approach: discovery, design, build and test in short cycles, with the client reviewing each step.

1. 1Brief
2. 2Asset register build
3. 3Maintenance cost dashboard
4. 4Insight

We built an asset register, linked maintenance work and spending to assets in the ERP and created dashboards showing cost per plant, per asset and per million litres treated. Plant engineers helped define asset categories so that reports reflected how equipment was actually maintained.

MIS & financial reportingERP developmentData analytics & dashboards

treatment plants

12

• Users and stakeholders from every affected team took part in discovery workshops and acceptance testing.

• Requirements were gathered through workshops, process walk-throughs and a review of existing systems and data.

• Peer code review on every change
• Automated and manual testing
• User-acceptance testing with the client
• Release checklist and rollback plan

• Usage and performance monitoring after launch
• Defect and support-ticket trends
• Process time before and after

• Management identified plants with rising maintenance costs and priced contract renewals with confidence.

Asset-level visibility turned maintenance from a cost into a planning tool.

• The operator also used the data to plan preventive maintenance and reduce emergency repairs.
• Track adoption and support tickets, and plan the next release from real usage.

What we recommended, and the client put into practice

• Contract negotiations became faster because the operator could support its pricing with evidence.

• Insight report and management presentation
• Interactive dashboard
• Deployed solution with documentation and handover
• Support and maintenance plan

• Repeat the measure after changes are in place to track progress.
• A natural follow-on question: what drives purifier purchase and replacement?