Enabling data-driven operations through a custom digital platform at Anglian Water.
Anglian Water needed a more effective way to manage Interruption to Supply events across its network. Aiimi delivered an Event Management Platform to enable faster response times, reduce manual effort, and improve regulatory compliance.
The Challenge
Anglian Water was facing multiple challenges around data and manual effort when dealing with Interruption to Supply (I2S) events, for which there are significant regulatory penalties. Response coordination relied on manual and fragmented processes, communication was inconsistent, and organisational silos created barriers to information sharing and joint decision-making. Other pain points included:
Challenges with the existing system used to capture live event data
Lack of access to current/historic event data and supporting information in one place
Manual and time-consuming reporting of I2S performance
Difficulty tracing data lineage, causing increased scrutiny from the regulator
No formal communications platform shared by field users and Control Centre.
Together, these issues made it difficult to manage live events efficiently, apply lessons learned from previous incidents, and maintain a clear operational picture across the entire network.
Our Solution
Aiimi has worked as a delivery and innovation partner to Anglian Water for more than 15 years. For this project, we were engaged to lead an Agile development squad to create an Event Management Platform (EMP): a unified digital solution, designed to make a single source of truth accessible to all relevant stakeholders.
The aim was to give Anglian Water a better way to coordinate I2S event responses, improve visibility across the network, and reduce the manual effort involved in managing and reporting on events. Built to support multiple business units including the Control Centre, the new platform provides a live dashboard and events map, situational awareness for senior management, and integration with Anglian Water’s existing client Data Lake, for real-time reporting.
By ingesting customer call and telemetry data from upstream systems and alerting the Control Centre, the EMP is able to rapidly reduce the time from event awareness to actively managing an event, and relevant historic events are flagged when a new event is created. This helps reduce event durations, as operators can access and apply learnings from previous events for faster resolution. Field technicians and managers are alerted immediately, and senior managers gain situational awareness of the riskiest events through the live dashboards and maps. With a clear line of sight to what is happening on the ground, Anglian Water is also better able to keep customers updated with accurate information and return-to-service times.
Aiimi's approach combined User-Centred Design, Agile development, and structured Change Management. Features were built iteratively and released in response to prioritised user needs. Close collaboration with stakeholders and key users on product vision and strategy development ensured the platform was aligned with operational requirements and objectives. Following the platform’s release, continued user research and testing of new features have ensured improvements are driven by user and business needs, extending its value over time.
The Results
The EMP enables Anglian Water to identify and respond to I2S events more quickly, with instant alerts, clear communication, and streamlined workflows significantly reducing the critical period between event detection and event management. Events are spotted sooner, managed faster, and resolved more efficiently. The platform has contributed to measurable improvements in regulatory compliance and risk reduction, while also supporting improvements in customer service. Other key benefits delivered include:
Improved compliance and data quality, increasing confidence in regulatory reporting.
Enhanced I2S processes and service design, supporting more effective and consistent ways of working.
Improved customer communications through better visibility of event information and more proactive, accurate estimated repair times.
Contributed to >50% improvement in correct valve positioning through reminder functionality.
Removed significant manual effort in producing monthly board packs and annual regulatory reports.
Improved restoration planning and data capture, enabling better-informed decisions on equipment and investment and positive penalty-avoidance impact.
Retired the legacy system, simplifying enterprise architecture.
Enabled faster prioritisation of operational effort and resource, through clear event visibility and risk-based scoring.
Deployment of the EMP has seen rapid adoption across operational teams, enhancing cross-team collaboration and helping to foster a culture of shared data ownership. With more than 1,000 active users, the platform has received overwhelmingly positive feedback, with 90% of users saying it has improved their workload.
What’s Next
While the EMP was originally built for Interruption to Supply events, it was intentionally designed as a scalable, reusable platform from the outset, and is now used as a case study for positive product and process design at Anglian Water.
The same platform, team, and approach have since been used to make delivery improvements in the Water Quality event management process. The EMP has also recently been expanded into handling the Storage Points inspection programme, with further opportunities being explored for Equipment Offline events too.
Beyond extending the platform to new operational processes, the EMP is also becoming a key data foundation for Anglian Water’s AI Accelerator work with Aiimi. By creating a richer and more structured source of I2S event data, the EMP is enabling new AI-powered experiments that build on the value already delivered. Current initiatives are exploring how historic I2S performance, seasonal planning inputs, operational records, and unstructured event documentation can be analysed to identify recurring patterns, root causes, risk indicators, and lessons learned from previous events.
This includes work focused on seasonal preparedness, helping operational teams use historic event data to plan more consistently ahead of high-risk periods, as well as work to surface relevant learning from historic incident records, field reports, and root cause information during live events. These initiatives aim to help Anglian Water move from capturing and managing I2S events more effectively, to using the EMP data set to predict risk, support faster decision-making, reduce repeat issues, and unlock further regulatory, operational, and customer benefits.
In this way, the EMP is not only supporting today’s event management processes, but also creating the high-quality operational data needed to power future automation, AI-driven insight and more proactive decision-making across Anglian Water.
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