Northumbrian Water and Netcall collaborate on a new app for asset inspections

As part of the 2021 Northumbrian Water Innovation Festival we explored how to improve the process flow for Northumbrian staff undertaking asset inspections.

In our one-day sprint, “Appy and you know it”, we looked at how to automate and improve the asset inspection process and build a self-service application to improve data collection and recording.

Many water companies own reservoirs as part of their estate and are required to carry out regular inspections. They ensure there are no safety issues that could pose a danger to members of the public or other users. This means regular checks and comprehensive asset audits. Multiple variables are checked and photographic evidence is captured.

Internally this produces a huge amount of work to process and often creates a backlog. Traditional back-end systems are not known for their flexibility so we used our Liberty Create low-code solution to automate this process, giving users a self-serve portal. We needed to help speed up the data collection and post-survey analysis. By using automation we could improve efficiency, making this a simpler task to complete.

During the festival, we hosted a ‘daily dash’, a rapid sprint-style workshop. We had representatives from a number of water companies as well as other key suppliers. Using an online virtual whiteboard, we workshopped ideas for improving the asset inspection process and discussed the key challenges that needed to be overcome.

After the festival, we took all the feedback and built the solution in just 3 days. Something that could only be achieved with a low-code solution. The feedback on the app was very positive, and the team are excited about how this could transform their inspection process.

We have made the asset inspection app available for free to all of our low-code customers on our Community AppShare.