The Client

Scottish Water is trusted to care for the water on which Scotland depends. As one of the UK’s top-performing water companies, Scottish Water puts its customers and communities at the heart of everything it does.

Customer Testimonial

“During a recent ‘Day in the Life Of’ with our Engineering & Mechanical team, it was inspiring to see a user-focused, simple tool that addresses a real business need: the ability to track and locate our spares. What makes it even more impressive is that the tool was originally developed by one of our apprentices and later enhanced and scaled in collaboration with FSP, one of our new Digital Partners. This highlights the potential for a flexible, high-value approach to digital transformation.”

 – Alex Plant, CEO, Scottish Water.

The Challenge

The Engineering & Mechanical (E&M) team in Scottish Water are a field-based team, dispersed nationally, working from vans, depots, and sites. Often, they found that when completing upgrades or repairs, there was a lack of visibility on available inventory in the field, meaning new parts would often be ordered as the default approach, whilst the same parts were potentially already available in another location. This was resulting in additional costs incurred for Scottish Water, as well as longer downtime and lead times to complete upgrades. They needed an easy-to-use solution that engineers would engage with, that allowed for the tracking and monitoring of E&M spare inventory.  

Scottish Water’s E&M Inventory App – a low-code, citizen-developed Application hosted on Microsoft’s Power Platform – was initially developed by one of Scottish Water’s engineering apprentices, as a Minimal Viable Product (MVP). It allowed engineering teams to identify, monitor and track inventory items out in the field

The app’s initial iteration offered core functionality, but lacked a scalable data model for broader use. Its user interface was counterintuitive in places, adding unnecessary steps to certain workflows. Hosted on a single environment, further development risked significant downtime for feature updates and testing. Additionally, the absence of a robust permissions model posed security risks and hindered wider rollout and onboarding.

FSP reviewed the App in its MVP form, providing recommendations on how to enhance and productionise the App and then delivering those recommendations.

The Solution

Recognising that the App’s key stakeholders were the field engineering team, with little background experience in Application development, it was important for FSP to keep the approach simple. FSP focused on user experience and bringing the Scottish Water team along on the journey to deliver an Enterprise-level, productionised version of the App that would provide real value for the end users.

FSP began by running a series of short workshops to fully understand the pain points from the end-user perspective, and presenting back both short-term, low-risk and quick recommendations, and a future-focused, longer-term backlog for development that would allow the App to go from MVP to Production-ready in a short timescale.

Leveraging FSP’s expertise in Power Platform, the app’s backend infrastructure was updated with a scalable data structure and improved permissions model. The UI was redesigned to align with Scottish Water’s branding, making it more intuitive and streamlining the inventory upload process. To address downtime, FSP also implemented a path-to-live and created separate Dev, Test, and Production environments.

The Benefits

• Built for long-term scalability and updates

A true Path-to-Live allowing additional features to be developed and tested without any impact to end users.

• Centralised data model

Allows for accurate reporting and gives the App owners the ability to easily maintain inventory lists and dropdowns.

• Cost & time saving

Through better visibility of available spare parts

• Empowered ownership for Scottish Water teams

Bringing the App under Scottish Water Change Governance to ensure development and testing standards.

• A user-centric interface

Ensuring the App remains intuitive and easy to navigate for the E&M team. For the users, by the users.

• Optimised for mobile-first access

Allowing the App to be used on the go, out in the field, anywhere!