Thames Water Helps Ensure and Maintain a Safe Water Supply For The London Area With Informatica Data Integration

This is an article from 2005 about Thames Water, that I found quite interesting and hopefully you will too. There has been some media exposure about how WFP users are somewhat responsible for the increase in water usage. But considering how much water companies like Thames Water waste on a daily basis, WFP users across the country are somewhat insignificant in their daily usage in real terms. Let's hope this new software they are using helps them to be more effecient in their water supply and infrastructure:

Thames Water Helps Maintain Safe Water Supply For London Area With Informatica Data Integration

UKs largest water utility uses PowerCenter and PowerExchange software to help analyze and optimize budget for infrastructure maintenance

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 10, 2005 Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), a leading provider of data integration software, today announced that Thames Water Utilities, the largest water and wastewater services company in the UK, has successfully implemented the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform and PowerExchange data access software as critical components of its data warehouse.
The solution is helping the company maintain the immense water-infrastructure system that serves 13 million customers by providing a more efficient and effective method to analyze information about its waterworks system, and determine the best ways to maximize its maintenance budget.

Thames Water Utilities is using Informatica's data integration software to help maintenance managers make the right decisions about how to continually refresh its infrastructure, much of which dates back more than a century to the original establishment of London's water and sewage systems. The maintenance program has a budget of approximately 40 million each year to sustain the company's estimated 20 billion in infrastructure assets.

"Our annual maintenance budget represents only around two percent of the total cost of the infrastructure, so we have to make smart decisions on repairs, replacements and refurbishments in order to spend that money wisely," said Jim Weir, business program support manager for Thames Water Utilities. "With Informatica PowerCenter and PowerExchange at the center of our enterprise-wide data integration strategy, we have gained a holistic view of all information relating to our water-system infrastructure - including data within our mainframe systems. This comprehensive set of data enables accurate analysis of our assets to ensure that we set the right priorities."

Added Weir, "The Informatica platform also enables significant IT cost and time savings, because it can carry out complex extractions without requiring our developers to recode every time we initiate a new data integration process. Every decision we make in the business now uses information that has been processed using PowerCenter."

Before using PowerCenter and PowerExchange to integrate data from its mainframe systems into a data warehouse, Thames Water Utilities used a time-consuming combination of maps, the knowledge of its personnel and a host of independent legacy systems to determine infrastructure maintenance priorities. The Informatica platform now provides the company with access to all of its critical enterprise data systems - including mainframes, midrange relational databases and file-based systems.

"For utilities organizations such as Thames Water, cost-effective maintenance of their physical infrastructures is mission critical," said Dave Berry, senior vice president of EMEA at Informatica. "Leveraging Informatica's data integration platform to provide its managers with a holistic view of all enterprise information - even data residing in complex mainframes - has successfully allowed Thames Water to make strategic decisions that keep its water system running smoothly, and in line with the annual maintenance budget."

Thames Water Utilities, which maintains water management and supply contracts across England, Scotland and Wales, is the largest water and wastewater services company in the UK. It serves customers in London and across the Thames Valley, from Kent and Essex in the east to the edges of Gloucestershire in the west. The company treats and supplies an average of about 2,700 million liters of water per day, and around 2,900 million liters of sewage.