Seven reasons to outsource waste treatment operations and maintenance
Article
Operations and Maintenance
Whatever your industry, effective water and wastewater management and environmental protection are business-critical. Failure to comply with associated legislation may incur high costs, negatively impact the environment, and significantly damage a business’s reputation.
Companies may believe that managing waste and water operations in-house is cheaper than outsourcing, but it may cost more than you think. Outsourcing and gaining specialist support and expertise could actually save you money. But that’s not all, read our seven reasons to outsource your water and wastewater operations and maintenance to find out more.
Let’s face it, when running your facility, water and waste management is something you have to do to keep things running smoothly and compliantly, but it’s probably not what gets you out of bed in the morning! Outsourcing allows you and your business to concentrate on management, optimisations and improvements to your core business that could make a real difference to your bottom line. All safe in the knowledge that your water and waste management is being operated to regulations and is delivering optimum performance.
What’s more, you gain access wider network of people and their knowledge and experience. For example, this may be someone off-site helping to answer any technical questions; provision of 24/7 monitoring capabilities; support and call-out services; and even access to out-of-the-box thinking when dealing with unforeseen challenges— such as how to hibernate an Anaerobic Digestion (AD) plant during a prolonged business shutdown.
Legal compliance and safeguarding the environment in accordance with the law isn’t just good practice, it protects your business' reputation and your bottom line.
As part of the Anglian Water Group we put in place industry-leading processes and monitoring to ensure compliance and protect the environment. Although compliance monitoring with regulations such as those set by the EA (in England) and SEPA (in Scotland) can be understood and carried out in-house, specialist companies, like Alpheus have expert knowledge and analytical scientists on-board to monitor data daily. This expertise enables us to identify and act on unusual trends early on to prevent compliance being compromised, thus avoiding events that could damage your brand and lead to hefty fines.
A specialist partner brings the benefit of knowledge and learnings from other clients and industries. We team this with our experience managing our own waste water treatment and recycling facilities to enable us to quickly identify key opportunities to improve operations and maintenance efficiencies, such as process changes, that can make particular jobs easier, quicker, safer or less expensive.
We have highly skilled people with significant expertise to undertake a process of monitoring, sampling and analysis. This gives us trend data and other results which help us to identify changes we can make to improve performance and realise benefits for our clients. We take pride in delivering continuous improvements for our customers, to help realise benefits and optimise performance in the medium to longer term. That’s why any improvement deliverables promised at tender stage can be built into your Service Level Agreement prior to the contract and partnership commencing.
Consumers are increasingly holding companies accountable for their environmental impact, so there is a strong focus on implementing sustainability initiatives to achieve Net Zero. An outsourced partner can bring expertise in this area that companies are unlikely to have in-house.
As water companies have the ambitious target of achieving this by 2030, we not only have access to the expertise and innovations of our parent company, Anglian Water, but we also have over 30 years’ experience in improving operations efficiency, recycling water and energy recovery, across a range of industries.
The right water and wastewater management partner is usually able to deliver significant savings on operational costs too – and this doesn’t just mean reducing overheads! Having your critical assets managed effectively minimises downtime, ensures equipment is performing efficiently and deliverers optimum performance. The right outsourcing partner will be able to use their expertise to identify ways to make your waste and water processing more efficient from start to finish. This could include helping you recover more water, and energy to achieve savings running your plant.
Alpheus provides Operations and Maintenance services to The Glenmorangie distillery. Due to a prolonged business shutdown during the coronavirus pandemic, we identified the most cost-effective approach for maintaining and hibernating the distillery's AD plant. We provided trusted advice on different existing options and outcomes– and then devised and executed a new plan that resulted in significant cost and environmental savings.
Health and Safety is critical to all businesses as part of our responsibility to our teams, the public and the environment, so we understand you’ll have this covered. That being said, having a multi-faceted, comprehensive plan can be tricky to get right. It’s easy to focus efforts on mitigating certain areas of risk whilst overlooking less likely, but potentially extremely dangerous issues.
The advantage of outsourcing is the expertise that they can bring to your site to help identify and eliminate potential vulnerabilities quickly and effectively through their experience across multiple business, industries and operations. This expertise includes Process Safety that progresses your Health & Safety strategy to the next level to deliver long term value and prevent unforeseen events that have the potential to be extremely damaging. Process safety is highly specialised and the associated costs of training and process development can be costly. With a partner like Alpheus, you have the benefit of a team of fully-trained Process Safety experts.
In a recent poll we discovered that the top challenge companies are facing in 2023 is recruiting and retaining people (above dealing with rising costs and meeting sustainability targets)!
By outsourcing this function, it not only removes a big headache but it also means that any staff you do have will benefit from industry leading training, development and the additional support of remote specialist teams. We have welcomed a number TUPE staff into Alpheus on outsourced contracts and believe a critical part of our success is offering them additional support and making them feel part of the Alpheus family.
As effective water and wastewater management is integral to the success of your business, it’s really more of a partnership than an outsourcing arrangement. We work as an extension of our customers’ teams and work closely with them to achieve long term goals as well as the day-to-day management. With many companies targeted with improving sustainability and recycling resources, we are working with a number of partners on initiatives to increase the volume of water being recycled to their plants and to convert waste to energy through anaerobic digestion.
As an experienced, expert outsourcing partner, Alpheus is well-equipped to deliver all the benefits we’ve outlined. We can take the stress of water and waste water management off your hands. We care about the service we provide, delivering what we promise, and going the extra mile where we can.
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