SymTerra + Thames Water: App-solutely fixing the basics

Below the bustling streets of London are the fast flowing tunnels of the Thames Water’s trunk sewer network connecting homes and businesses to the capital’s sewage works.

Thames Water are the largest water company in the UK and the Strategic Pumping & Trunk Sewers (SPTS) team are responsible for looking after this historic network and normally in the news for fighting fatbergs and concretebergs.

Entering sewers is high risk and working collaboratively with the whole team, Thames Water has implemented SymTerra with digital simplicity and health and safety at its heart.

“Success is sending everyone home to their loved ones at the end of each working shift, fit well and happy. We want to provide the right assurance to our colleagues, our stakeholders, to Thames Water and ourselves that we are managing health and safety, as well as the risk to the environment and our customers.” Richard Dennett, Project Delivery Manager

The app provides a holistic view of their trunk sewer assets, including performance and progress monitoring of their condition and planned access works. Recognising the importance of knowledge sharing, now all planned works and asset information is collated to build a ‘golden thread’ of the critical assets that serve the nation’s capital.

This is fixing the basics by building an archive of below ground workstreams to include sewer entry and asset logs, establishing a safe work procedure that consists of:

• Pre planning entry

• Procedures for entry into, working within, and leaving confined spaces

• Establishing an archive of critical information and images of below ground assets for future works.

Health and Safety and project monitoring are inbuilt to allow automatic reporting and an easily searchable database of all aspects of the project in hand with very little time or effort needed from the user. This allows delivery teams to focus on delivery and at the same time provide a valuable permanent record for the management team.

With SymTerrra, the SPTS team have demonstrated to delivery teams that this isn’t another unfriendly digital application and is rather one that site teams and engineers find easy to use, enhancing safety and visibility, as well as crucially, enabling greater communications between teams on and off site.

Starting with the basics and key pain points for delivery teams, SymTerra and Thames Water Trunk Sewers are now working to expand the application further. So watch this space for further updates.