How Europe’s water utilities can face ageing infrastructure and regulations without doubling staff
At the same time, external pressures are increasing. Utilities must filter out microplastics, monitor emerging contaminants and prepare for more frequent droughts and floods. The cost of energy and chemicals has also risen sharply since 2021.
The result is a sector that must do more with rising costs and a shrinking workforce. Digital tools can help meet the moment, but they need to be rapidly effective, cost-efficient and can't create new work.
In this article, we present a four-pillar strategy that meets these criteria and has been implemented, fully or in part, by several major operators across the continent. It relies on several solutions within Hexagon’s portfolio that address these operational and regulatory challenges holistically, from asset management to compliance monitoring.
The foundation: establishing a single operational record
Water companies typically operate with very fragmented and siloed systems. Many utilities still depend on paper logs, spreadsheets or custom applications that don't communicate with each other. Information often varies in granularity, completeness and accuracy.
This fragmentation leads to several consequences.
At a wastewater treatment plant, where maintenance accounts for 15% to 25% of total operational costs, poor data management carries direct costs
The primary one is inflated maintenance budgets. At a wastewater treatment plant, where maintenance typically accounts for 15% to 25% of total operational costs, poor data management carries significant direct costs.
This number doesn't even account for indirect costs, such as the time wasted by maintenance teams acting on inconsistent or outdated information. This is particularly detrimental when an incident occurs, as it leads to slow, ineffective responses and costly repairs. Lastly, when regulators request evidence of maintenance or investment, staff must extract and reconcile data from several systems, a process that can take days.
A unified asset and maintenance platform addresses these gaps. A powerful combination integrates a cloud GIS, such as HxGN NetWorks, with an Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) platform. This connects geospatial network data with asset condition and maintenance information to provide a single operational view of the network.
