Thames Water & SymTerra Case Study

The Strategic Pumping & Trunk Sewers Delivery Team maintain some of Thames Water's and London's biggest critical infrastructure.

Entering sewers is high risk, which was compounded by poor communication and work records and asset information being absent, incomplete, incorrect or outdated.

So, to improve the process Thames Water asked SymTerra to work alongside them to establish a communication and asset reporting tool that works across multiple contractors.

SymTerra is now used across the 110,000km trunk sewer network to document all works on Thames Water’s assets.

As seen in:

Context and pain points:

Thames Water started by identifying their key priorities and needs​

  • Reduce the no. of confined space entries​

  • Plan diversions better​

  • Increase our asset condition awareness​

  • Have a record of all activities on the network, including from our contractors

This was refined by the team into 3 key business needs:

  • Improve reporting and knowledge sharing​

    Establish a shorter and faster way to report progress and issues as they happen.   ​

  • ​Improve visibility of works​

    Allow site and management teams to more easily see real-time status updates and asset info instead of piecing together multiple different sources and timelines. ​

  • Improve access and visibility of historic knowledge and asset information​

    Establish a single source of truth and easily see past info to drive improvements in future works.  ​

​

“There are many stakeholders involved, which can lead to confusion and frustrations, but with SymTerra we have sorted our works communications across our network, reduced our confined space entries and improved the visibility of the status of our assets.”

Richard Dennett, Head of Strategic pumping & Trunk sewers, Thames Water

What Thames Water and SymTerra did

  • Built out key forms and workflows to capture the info we needed.

  • We then brought in our Assets and Activities so teams could easily log photos & videos, reports and updates against them. This approach took a bottom-up approach to asset management.

  • We didn’t forget our Contractors and our supply chain working on our assets. With adoption proven internally, we subsequently rolled out SymTerra to our contractors.

  • We then focused on automating our reporting, with a daily summary email of what's happened as well as connecting to our project management dashboards.

Benefits

We are working with greater visibility and have fast, easy and flexible real-time reporting

Client benefits:

  • Delivery teams spend less time doing admin. 

  • See updates and issues in real-time.  

  • A connected workforce rather than one of multiple fragmented silos, streamlining communication and reducing risk.  

  • Evidence and history record established. 

Operator / Contractor benefits:

  • Faster reporting to client. Both can easily see the work teams have undertaken. 

  • Both can raise issues faster for better transparency. 

  • Commercial defensibility. We did it. 

We have a full audit trail for better compliance and reporting

Client benefits:

  • Accurate and transparent reporting.

  • Centralised communication provides a full audit trail. 

Operator / Contractor benefits:

  • The platform acts as the communication bridge between the night shift workers and the day shift managers.

  • Commercial defensibility.

Key Results

Transformed Communication

Real-time works information across 110,000km of sewer networks.

Over 60,000 updates from site teams redefining how works on the trunk sewers and their assets are communicated and leveraged.

Increased Compliance

Effective planning and prioritisation of safety through ‘what3words’, which is embedded across all features of the app.

Facilitating training of new staff, leaving a legacy of historic works

Revolutionised Data Management

Real-time reporting, with photos, locations and time stamps, easily shared with stakeholders.

The first pipeline of asset information from the point of work, allowing the water industry to unlock their digital twin.

Key Metrics

In less than 12 months, we went from 1 pilot project to rolling out across all the trunk sewer network and our entire supply chain.

Outcomes:

  • 10% increase in productivity

  • 15% reduction in subcontractor costs by avoiding rework & revisits

  • 20% reduction in admin time with real-time asset reporting

  • 35% boost in work completion rates through enhanced planning

  • 60% improvement in worksite visibility and reporting accuracy

Want to see how SymTerra can transform your site communication project reporting and asset management?

Project teams of all sizes are using SymTerra to change their projects for the better. And we have the case studies to prove it.

“It's the speed and simplicity of it all, which just makes life a lot easier.“

Tony Bowman, Rescue 2

“With previous systems, we took photos on one platform and allocated the activity to the engineer on another for comments from site. We would then have to merge the data on to a word document copying text and adding photos to share with the client or other teams. This was time consuming and meant we'd have to limit or loose data, photos or miss information.

With SymTerra, all info/photos are in one place to view/document making data sharing simple without having to transfer from multiple systems.”

Joe Taylor, Operations Manager, Lanes Group

Hear it straight from the horse's mouth

Listen to our users