ANGLIAN WATER PRODUCTION PLANNING: SUEZ CASE STUDY
For water companies across the UK, balancing customer demand with increasingly constrained water resources is becoming more challenging every year. Climate change, population growth and tighter environmental regulation are all adding complexity to the task of supplying safe, reliable drinking water.
For Anglian Water, which serves one of the UK’s most water-stressed regions, these pressures have made effective production planning more important than ever.
The Challenge
Anglian Water’s operational teams are responsible for managing a diverse and interconnected network of treatment works, reservoirs, pumping stations and transfer pipelines. At the same time, they must ensure compliance with abstraction licence conditions designed to protect the environment while continuing to meet customer demand.
Planning for these competing priorities requires decisions across multiple timescales, from short-term operational changes to long-term drought resilience and investment planning. Historically, however, much of this work relied on separate data sources and manual processes, making it difficult to build a complete picture of the system and test alternative operating strategies quickly.
As weather patterns become less predictable and operational pressures increase, Anglian Water recognised the need for a more integrated approach to planning and decision-making.
The Solution
To address this, Anglian Water partnered with SUEZ to implement the Production Planning Module of Aquadvanced® Water Supply.
The platform creates a digital representation of the water supply network, bringing together operational constraints, abstraction licence requirements, asset availability and demand forecasts into a single planning environment.
Using advanced optimisation and scenario modelling, planners can compare different operating strategies and understand how the system is likely to perform under a range of conditions, including drought events, maintenance activities, changing demand patterns and future network developments.
The solution supports planning across multiple horizons, from immediate operational decisions through to longer-term strategic planning, while providing clear visualisation of system performance and constraints.
Implementation was supported by a programme of workshops, testing and collaboration between Anglian Water and SUEZ, ensuring the platform reflected the utility’s operational and regulatory requirements before being rolled out more widely.
The Results
The trial demonstrated significant improvements in both planning efficiency and operational resilience.
Production plans that previously took hours, and sometimes days, to generate can now be produced in minutes, allowing teams to respond much faster to changing network conditions. Operators can generate plans on demand and quickly assess the impact of different scenarios, helping them make informed decisions during both routine operations and unexpected events.
The platform also provides a consistent view of the system across multiple teams, improving coordination and ensuring decisions are based on the same information.
As Scott Cooke, Supply Support Manager at Anglian Water, explains:
“All operational teams – Supply, Networks, Tac Ops and Abstraction Licensing – are now working to the same set of instructions, which is critical during Summer Demand, but useful all year round.”
The ability to optimise production plans while remaining within licence constraints has improved confidence in operational decision-making and strengthened Anglian Water’s approach to managing future water resource challenges.
The solution is also helping to support longer-term planning activities, including drought preparedness and major infrastructure investment decisions such as water transfer schemes.
For Adrian Hinchliffe, Supply Manager at Anglian Water, one of the biggest benefits has been the ability to understand the system as a whole:
“We’re much more confident that the right decisions will be made now that Production Planning have a view of the whole system.”
By providing a single, coordinated view of the network and enabling faster, more informed planning decisions, Aquadvanced® Water Supply is helping Anglian Water build a more resilient and adaptable water supply system for the years ahead.
—
To find out more about this case study go to https://www.suez.com/en/uk/case-studies/anglian-water-production-planning-case-study .
