Previous work: Benchmarking of water and sewage companies

Completed by Dr Nathan Walker

Background & Challenge
The provision of fundamental services by water and sewage companies (WaSCs) requires substantial energy and material inputs, which can have significant environmental, social, and economic impacts if not sustainably managed.

Solution
Generate a methodology to analyse the efficiency of 12 WaSCs in the UK over a 6-year period, using metrics including operational and capital expenditure, water supplied and treated, self-generated renewable energy, and customer satisfaction. Results indicated the UK water sector improved in productivity by 1.8% on average and still had room for improvement, as a technical decline was evident for both the best and worst performers. Further decomposition of productivity revealed that improvements in economies of scale and scope resulted in the sector improvement. The analysis also extended to individual companies, so it was possible to highlight efficiency gaps and areas of better performance for each.  

Benefits
Enabled recommendations to be made on areas to improve and highlighted companies to evaluate in order to learn from their best practices. Furthermore, the study showed that careful selection of appropriate input and output variables for efficiency benchmarking is critical to align with sustainability objectives and to target future investment. This approach can be applied to any company in any sector.

Auditing and benchmarking

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