Northumbrian Water Client Win

We’re delighted to announce that we are working with Northumbrian Water and Sunderland City Council on an exciting new software development project that will help improve water efficiency and reduce costs.

It all started with a hackathon

The early background of this project began back in October 2016 when the idea behind the software was set out in a hackathon as part of a series of hackathons delivered by Northumbrian Water. Run from Sunderland Software City the initial objective of the hack was to explore themes including, analysis of different available data sets, potential integrations between them and the development of ways of expressing that data. The anticipated end result was that the data could be used to provide useful insight for energy managers at Sunderland City Council helping them to become UK's most water efficient council and the UK's first Smart Water City.

A number of teams drawn from across the North competed in the two day hack using varying skillsets including, big data analysis, machine learning, data visualisation and software development. The enigma team included designers and developers who have experience on working with a number of utilities clients on data analysis and visualisation software. The work we presented at the end of the two day hack was identified as one of the winners and commended for its understanding of the issues, overall approach and practical solutions.

The result of the hackathon was that the project was taken forward with a business case to develop a full scale piece of software to help council energy managers to proactively monitor usage patterns, identify issues and take action in a more strategic way. As one of the winners of the hackathon, Enigma were shortlisted for the tender process to develop the full scale software. Following a competitive tender process Northumbrian Water commissioned us as their chosen developer to deliver this exciting project.

The software development project

The project kicked off late last year and we are working closely with the Utility Management Team at Sunderland City Council and key stakeholders at Northumbrian Water. We’ll be able to provide full details of the full features of the finalised software in the summer but to whet your appetite for now here’s a top level overview.

Currently Sunderland City Council utility and energy managers use a number of different systems to do their day to day jobs of analysing usage patterns across the council’s estate of over 400 buildings. Variable data quality, frequency and fidelity and little interrelation between data sets present the first significant challenge. The initial aims of the project are to map and aggregate data together so that rather than switching between spreadsheets with thousands of lines of data utility managers can get all of their information in one place.

Once this objective is met then we will provide ways or manipulating the data with different visualisations and ways or prioritising information. This will free up the limited resources of the utility management team to take a more proactive and strategic approach to finding efficiencies, reducing consumption and as a result bills.

The potential ramifications of this project are far reaching and could have significant benefits for both Sunderland City Council and Northumbrian Water as well as other councils and utility companies across the UK.

Wider experience with utilities

Working on this project with Northumbrian Water strengthens our already strong experience in the utilities sector further. We already work with Distribution Network Operators (DNO’s) Northern Powergrid and Western Power Distribution as well as the umbrella organisation for transmission and distribution network operators for gas and electricity the Energy Networks Association.