Data Insight
Improvement programme summary
The Data Insight improvement programme seeks to address the causes of poor-quality data and develop tools to access, analyse, cleanse and enrich this data. This programme will identify how we can enhance our current data analytics capabilities and overlay market data with publicly available datasets to provide greater data insight and support in areas such as water efficiency and leakage reduction.
With over three years’ experience operating the market, we know that data quality issues continue to cause significant operational challenges which heavily impact both trading party performance and customer outcomes. These issues affect the accuracy of customer bills through the quality of settlement and leakage calculations. What’s more, data quality issues restrict a customer’s ability to make informed decisions on the switching of services and water efficiency offerings.
Its delivery is phased across all three years of our business plan and includes:
How trading parties and customers will benefit
This programme is a key component in delivering our Data Insight strategic priority, by enabling us to make decisions based on high quality data.
By adopting a central and standardised approach to data cleanse activities and by implementing data analytics tools, trading parties will be able to proactively address data and performance issues. By having confidence in the data, trading parties will reduce their indirect costs and be able to focus on delivering value added services to customers.
These improvements will be created by a programme that:
Improves the accuracy of financial settlement and ensures better quality consumption data available for customer bills
Enables trading parties to benefit from accessible high-quality data supported by a ‘single version of the truth’
Improves trading parties’ ability to make informed decisions on the delivery of core services to customers and develop new, innovative offerings, benefitting from cleansed data and improved reporting
Gives customers confidence in the data to better understand their water usage
Improve MOSL's ability to take a more targeted approach to understanding, and intervening on, performance issues.
“We’re public sector (schools, care homes, offices, depots. leisure centres) and we’re categorised in the same way as all non-household customers, however, it’s clear that a ‘one-size fits all’ approach does not work and we support MOSL’s focus on developing a greater understanding of customer segmentation and consumption data.”
Jonathan Williams, Utilities Officer, Sefton Council
How the workstream builds on our current 2020/21 Business Plan
During 2020/21 we have been developing a prioritised data cleanse plan to address the quality of core items of data in CMOS. These core items include meter, customer and premises data items which have been shown to have the most significant impact on trading parties’ abilities to serve customers efficiently.
This year we have also increased our focus on the current limitations with the CMOS database and the associated reporting tools and have scoped the development of a modern data warehouse with improved analytical capabilities.
In addition to a focus on the quality of core data items such as meter and customer details, our improvement programme will incorporate findings from the 2019/20 market audit which detailed the contribution of the new connections process to poor quality customer premises data, resulting in overstated levels of market vacancy. This, in turn, causes problems with customer premises not being accurately reflected in the market, challenges for levels of consumption and leakage to be understood and inefficiencies in meter reading activity.
Data Insight was highlighted as one of our most critical programmes by many respondents in our business plan consultation. As a result of the feedback received, we have changed the phasing of spend within our plan, with £100k moved from year three (2023/24) to year one (2021/22). Previously, there was no specific spend allocated for year one.
This will enable us to accelerate the meter and premises related parts of the data cleanse work. It will allow MOSL to support trading party improvements in meter location data, for example, by using commercial datasets to target key areas of poor data. This work will help accelerate benefits to trading parties of being able to find meters, take read reads and then submit them onto CMOS.
