The way water retailers and wholesalers work together to deliver processes for non-household customers has been a major source of friction since the market opened in 2017.
The lack of standardisation of the market’s key activities – from how customer enquiries are handled, to requests to replace water meters – has affected the speed, reliability and quality of service for customers, while increasing inefficiency and cost for trading parties.
In 2020 MOSL was given a mandate by Ofwat to work with trading parties to propose and implement a solution to make these two-way – bilateral – processes simpler, faster and more reliable.
The answer? To agree a standardised approach for each process and create a central ‘hub’ through which all service requests could be raised and managed.
The original business case predicted that the programme would cost £3.1 million over five years and deliver efficiency savings estimated at £1.2 million per year, plus several significant non-financial benefits, such as improved data quality and reduced barriers to entry.
With the central hub and first process launched in September 2021, the programme is on course to deliver the first 15 of the market’s most important processes by the end of November, representing more than 80% of processes with associated performance standards (by volume).
Encouragingly, the benefits being realised by the programme are looking very positive. Our latest analysis, which is about to be published, is due to confirm that the programme will pay back earlier than the business case and the annual financial benefits to be substantially higher.
So, what does this mean for trading parties in practice? Based on an analysis of the first five processes, trading parties are reporting dramatic reductions in the time taken to process requests.
For example, retailers have reported that the time taken to initiate service requests has fallen significantly from 5-30 minutes pre-hub to 1-5 minutes now. This is more than 100% faster than predicted and equates to more than 20,000 hours saved across the market.
Similarly, wholesalers are reporting that processing requests is now taking 3-5 minutes, compared to 5-25 minutes previously – a saving of more than 25,000 hours.
The number of service requests being rejected due to incomplete information has also fallen by more than half, from 14% to 6%, with the time taken to process them down from 30 minutes to 5 minutes or even less. This is nearly four times the improvement anticipated in the business case and represents another 15,000 hours saved.
We are also delighted to hear that trading parties are finding the web portal easy to use, which is making training faster and helping scale back the size of the team needed to process bilaterals.
A further nine processes are due to go live at the end of November, marking the end of the current phase of the programme and we are currently talking to trading parties about how far and how fast they wish to add the remaining processes so they can switch off their legacy systems.
To find out more about the programme and the benefits so far, please visit the MOSL website or email
