Customer Case Study

Yorkshire Water improves identification of areas at risk from flooding by using SPSS Predictive Analytics
Situation
Yorkshire Water is part of the Kelda Group. Yorkshire Water provides 1.7m households and 140,000 businesses with water and sewerage services. It manages the collection, treatment and distribution of water, supplying around 1.24 billion litres of drinking water each day that's the equivalent of a glass of water for every person on the planet. It also collects, treats and disposes of about one billion litres of waste water safely back into the environment everyday. One of the company's objectives is to pro-actively reduce the number of DG5 other causes incidents which can lead to internal flooding. Previous predictive techniques used were outdated and cumbersome. Yorkshire Water wanted to be able to predict the likelihood of a flooding incident occurring in an area easily and rapidly. Analysis of the company's data revealed that by applying statistical analysis and trending techniques to the data, it could produce more accurate prediction models.

Critical Issue
Originally SPSS base analytics was selected as the preferred technique and product. However during the initial development of the statistical model it became apparent that SPSS Clementine software would offer a further uplift in predictability in identifying areas at risk from flooding compared with Yorkshire Water's traditional methods. Clementine allowed Yorkshire Water to understand the influencing factors in the lead up to a potential flooding incident occurring. The decision trees derived from the data mining process have allowed Yorkshire Water to understand the derived influences and to validate the decision trees prior to inclusion of these factors in the final models. In order to build and deploy the models rapidly, the company utilised the consultancy services of SPSS, which proved very effective and efficient. The software was then integrated into a bespoke Yorkshire Water application. Using Clementine, the company was able to look at the 24,000 ordnance survey quadrants in Yorkshire and rank them on a week by week basis according to there risk of flooding. Risk per quadrant was calculated based on factors such as number of cellared properties, length of sewers, rainfall, minor & major excavation work in the area, reactive jetting orders and customer contacts. Prior to using Predictive Analytics from SPSS, it was only able to look at four variables in terms of factors influencing flooding; now it is able to look at 120. This process now only takes minutes and this allows the company to react to changes in risk on a week by week basis rather than monthly/quarterly. Before the SPSS implementation, a very labour intensive method of determining areas of key DG5 other causes significance was compiled by using spreadsheets and manually analysing the data. Due to the length of time taken to carry out this task very few data feeds were used in this method, this lead to a lesser degree of prediction and often the data used was as a result of a flooding incident having occurred. So now the process is much more proactive maintenance rather than reactive.

The main return on the investment was to move away from the old and cumbersome method of reactive maintenance to a pro-active method of maintenance, thereby reducing incidents of other causes flooding and improving customer service and satisfaction
- David Oldknow, Project Coordinator DG5, Yorkshire Water

Results
The result of the initial data analysis and model building revealed that several previously used data fields actually conflicted with the aim of becoming predictive. New and more data feeds could now be introduced into the model and their influences on the prediction of the likelihood of flooding determined. The speed with which models could be built and analysed allowed several variants to be included and excluded in the derivation of the decision trees, this allowed rapid optimisation of the final model and the key data feed influence to be derived. ........continued

SPSS (UK) Ltd. First Floor, St. Andrews House, West Street, Woking, Surrey, GU21 6EB. Sales: 01483 719201. Email - sales@spss.co.uk For more examples of SPSS customer success stories, visit: www.spss.co.uk

Customer Case Study

Yorkshire Water

continued....

Some very interesting factors came out of the analysis work. Quadrants where there were older sewers and where there had been no rainfall for longer periods of time were identified as becoming a higher risk from flooding. David Oldknow, Project Co-Ordinator DG5 said, The main return on the investment was to move away from the old and cumbersome method of reactive maintenance to a pro-active method of maintenance, thereby reducing incidents of other causes flooding and improving customer service and satisfaction. Improved proactive blockage detection rates can be clearly seen by using the models, the increase in blockages detected has improved by 25-30%. A target was set at 480 proactive blockages to be detected between April and November 2004 and the number detected is actually 613 as a result of Predictive analytics. This has consequently allowed a reduction in potential flooding incidents to occur and so has improved customer service. By utilising the existing available resource in a more cost effective way, further savings have been gained. Blockage clearance works can be prioritised on a longer timescale thereby allowing the jetting contractor to optimise his workload. The risk score assigned to an area is being used to focus proactive asset renewal works on high risk assets in the key high risk areas. The project has been such a great success, that Yorkshire Water is now looking to extend the use of Predictive Analytics from SPSS to other parts of the business such as pollution and pumping station failures to name but a few.

Improved proactive blockage detection rates can be clearly seen by using the models, the increase in blockages detected has improved by 25-30%.
- David Oldknow, Project Coordinator DG5, Yorkshire Water

SPSS (UK) Ltd. First Floor, St. Andrews House, West Street, Woking, Surrey, GU21 6EB. Sales: 01483 719201. Email - sales@spss.co.uk For more examples of SPSS customer success stories, visit: www.spss.co.uk