Peer utilities of the international cooperation programme WaterWorx periodically share their knowledge with each other. Due to the pandemic, this is now usually done online, so that all partners worldwide can participate.The Dutch partner Oasen and the Indonesian PDAM Sragen organized a webinar under the theme "How to reduce NRW in a sustainable way." After a short introduction about how the WaterWorX Programme is organized by Oasen , the Mayor of Sragen talked about the developments at the Indonesian drinking water company.
This webinar was well received and even made the news on the Indonesian national TV channel.
According to Oasen WaterWorX coordinator, Pieter Cusell, “after the webinar, press releases were issued that ensured that drinking water companies in Java now contact the water company Sragen for questions and assistance. This is a very nice development, because we really encourage Sragen not to keep the knowledge to itself, but also to share it with its neighbor water companies. This makes the impact of our collaboration even greater."
Reducing leakage
For years, Oasen and PDAM Sragen have been working successfully on reducing leakage losses. For a year now, they have been combining this with setting up customer service in the local parter utility.
Rob, the infrastructure project manager for the last year, coaches in reducing NRW and shares that "the Indonesian drinking water company has achieved a lot. The NRW has decreased by about 20%. We will now expand this further. Due to COVID measures, we cannot work on site, but we have online contact every month and discuss the results. In collaboration with Oasen, PDAM Sragen developed a dashboard on which they now monitor the NRW per region. They are very passionate and inventive. We learn a lot from them."
Oasen and PDAM Sragen work on reducing leakage losses
Implementation of customer service
Han, customer team manager, explains that “when you set up a good customer service, you discover where the complaints come from and, for example, where water interruptions can be found. Through customer satisfaction surveys, we receive feedback and we can improve our services more effectively. Staff in PDAM Sragen is extremely motivated: they are for example very keen to learn and implement innovative approaches to collect data of customers, payments and meter readings. In fact, there was a lot of interest for this during the webinar. Written questions were received about setting up a customer system with complaints registrations and customer satisfaction measurements."Spreading knowledge
Han explains “other water companies on Java have signed up to participate in discussions about complaints registration and customer satisfaction measurements. This is how knowledge spreads.”
Han is proud and at the same time critical: “We learn a lot from each other and it is nice to see how well they handle everything. However, we must keep our focus and not get stuck in this initial phase. It is important to further deepen the capacity building and improvements.”
This article was originally published at oasen.nl
