Innovation through collaboration: Rethinking asset risk at the Northumbrian Water Innovation Festival
The Northumbrian Water Innovation Festival is built on a simple but powerful idea: bring together people with different perspectives to solve the industry’s toughest challenges.
This week, the IFS Copperleaf team joined Northumbrian Water and experts from across the UK water sector for a sprint exploring one of those challenges—how to make better investment decisions for assets where there isn’t enough historical or deteoration data to predict how they will perform over time.
For critical assets like pipes and pumps, established deterioration models help planners understand future risk. But many other asset types are unique, fail infrequently, or simply lack the data needed to build traditional models. As a result, planners often have to rely on experience, judgement and fragmented information when assessing risk and prioritising investment.
Our sprint set out to explore a different approach.
Rather than focusing solely on traditional asset data, we asked how organisations could also make use of operational knowledge, field observations and other contextual information to build a more complete picture of asset health and uncertainty.
Over the course of 4 days, representatives from water utilities including Northumbrian Water, Scottish Water, United Utilities and Portsmouth Water, together with industry partners worked together to map where data gaps exist, understand the impact those gaps have on planning decisions, and design a new way of bringing multiple sources of information together into a structured, transparent decision-making process.
One of the strongest themes to emerge was the value of combining technical asset data with human expertise. Observations from the field, operational experience and contextual knowledge often provide insights that aren’t captured in traditional asset systems, yet can play a critical role in understanding how an asset is likely to behave.
This sprint showed that it’s not just about having more data, it’s about understanding the gaps, using the knowledge we already have, and creating better visibility to support smarter investment planning.
Lisa McKenzie
Lead Functional Consultant
IFS Copperleaf
The team also explored how better reporting and visualisation could help planners and executive leaders gain greater visibility into uncertainty across their asset portfolios, enabling more informed conversations about risk, investment priorities and organisational objectives.
The sprint achieved a shared understanding of the problem, a validated design for a future solution, and a roadmap for how this approach could be developed further.
Perhaps most importantly, the week reinforced the value of collaboration. Bringing together asset planners, engineers, technology specialists and representatives from multiple water utilities created an environment where ideas could be challenged, refined and strengthened through shared experience.
The sprint gave us the opportunity to share challenges openly, learn from organisations at different stages of their journey, and leave with practical ideas we can take back to our teams.
Daniel Telford
Asset Investment Planner
Portsmouth Water
Innovation isn’t just about new technology, it’s about bringing the right people together to solve real-world problems. The conversations and ideas that emerged throughout the week are an exciting step towards helping organisations make more consistent, transparent and value-based investment decisions, even when certainty is impossible.
A huge thank you to Northumbrian Water for a fantastic Innovation Festival, and to everyone who contributed their expertise, challenged assumptions and helped shape the future of asset investment planning.