Delivering drinking water
Rather than spoiling it, is what we expect water companies to do.
A water company –servicing the metropolitan area of one of Europe’s major capitals– recently discovered that the amount of water that actually reaches homes and offices is only 60% of what’s pumped into their tubes. Which means that 40% of all the water launched into this enormous piping and tubing system is actually lost and spoiled. Not a very comforting thought, when drinking water is said to be the single most scarce resource on earth. Not to mention the huge cost involved.
This company decided to act quickly; before the public would catch word of it...
Obviously, leaking tubes accounted for nearly 95% of all the spoiled water. Replacing all the tubes was out of the question. But shortening the response time for the repairs of tubes seemed an obvious first step.
A VSM was done to draw the current state of the repairing process. It was found out that on average daily four calls for repairs were made, with peaks after the weekends. The average lead time of the end-to-end repair process was hard to calculate but estimated to be around 72 hours. The four daily calls were collected in five different computer systems and copied in many more systems, before the actual repair team would be launched to work on their batch of the day.
When the repair team would finally arrive on the spot, it would almost invariably be the wrong spot, or their data sheet would contain erroneous data on the conditions of piping and materials and tools needed. Which was leading to a rescheduling of their action (further complicating the life of the schedulers), or to an additional run to the tools and materials warehouse to get the right stuff, causing long delays in the repair job. Not to mention too many repair men who had long passed the point of being proud and efficient professionals.
The team decided to focus their first action on simplifying the organization’s data collection, initially to two systems only and with no retyping of data. This helped to reduce the amount of gathered data with 75%. And to triple the number of ‘First Time Right Arrivals’ of the repair teams. The amount of water saved has not been calculated yet. But it’s clear that this is a great first step, to be followed by many more, eventually building on a responsible, smart and proud workforce in charge of a responsible job.