The key influence on the Capital Investment Programme is to deliver better value for money and a superior service for Scottish Water’s five million customers as well as environmental improvements to Scotland’s rivers and coastlines.
Scottish Water’s customers, who are paying towards Capital Investment Programme and who will benefit most from the efficiency gains, remain a key focus for both Scottish Water and Solutions.
It is their needs, as well as the commercial interests of Solutions shareholders, that drive the ethos of ‘Delivering more for less’.
This proof of Solutions’ vision to Deliver More for Less has been achieved through a highly focused approach to the programme. Together with Scottish Water, a shared understanding has been developed of the regulatory contract and of the priority to focus on the delivery of regulated outputs.
A major strategy for driving efficiencies out of the Capital Investment Programme was to select the best asset delivery working practices that the Solutions’ partners had employed in their own organisations across 13 years of privatisation in England and Wales and standardise them within Solutions.
The benefits of a fresh approach to the way projects are handled, through initiatives such as clustering - the grouping together of similar projects - have brought major efficiencies to the programme, particularly on the unsatisfactory Combined Sewer Overflows (uCSO) and Reservoir Security work.
Standardisation of processes based on best practice from across the partners and the consistency brought by the use of standardised ‘Signature Solutions’ have also delivered savings as the number of projects going into construction increased.
The £2m WwTW at Tarland is a Signature Solution, a standardised design aimed at reducing design time and operational costs.
Improvements, particularly around the asset handover and asset acceptance processes, have ensured clarity of responsibility for all parties and the engineering teams have been able to apply valuable lessons learned from the delivery of the Q&S II Programme to the ‘Start Early’ Programme.
As a result, Solutions helped Scottish Water achieve the WIC directive of delivering for £500m less than Scottish Water's original estimate of £2.3bn, savings which were passed on to Scottish Water's customers.
Solutions and Scottish Water have also continued to work together to drive out further efficiencies in procurement across every aspect of the supply chain, from concrete to telecoms.
