Syndicat des Eaux d’Île-de-France – France

Issue

At the time of the Greater Paris project and reflection on the pooling of resources and the streamlining of production tools, Syndicat des Eaux d’Île-de-France (SEDIF), the largest public utility in France, focuses on customer satisfaction and the sustainability of management combining transparency and performance for cost effectiveness.

The customer's objectives

Even though it is at its first Climate Water Energy Plan, Sedif intends to reduce the energy consumption of its equipment and its greenhouse gas emissions and better preserve the resource.

Veolia's solution

Make innovation a priority in all areas from production optimisation, network maintenance and emergency call-outs, management of customer responses to risk management. At the heart of the system, ServO - a hypervision and remote control centre equipped with artificial intelligence - was developed by Veolia Eau Île-de-France, a Veolia subsidiary.

Innovation

Servo, the data of which is stored in a data centre, was created in 2011 by Veolia Eau Île-de-France which has been SEDIF's service manager for almost a century. Fully operational since 2016, ServO - also known as a hypervisor, a virtual platform that allows multiple operating systems to work together at the same time - provides a 360° view of the network.

Technologies

- The ServO hypervisor receives all the technical data from SEDIF's three main plants located in Méry-sur-Oise, Choisy-le-Roi, and Neuilly-sur-Marne as well as secondary sites, such as reservoirs and water towers. Equipped with artificial intelligence, it recovers, calculates, and crosses nearly 1.250 billion bytes of real-time data, from the river up to customer homes. As it is connected to water production, transportation, storage, and supply locations, it can instantly detect dysfunctions. It can also detect deteriorations in water quality, altered by an unsuitable temperature or pressure or by the presence of chemicals. This is made possible by 200 sensors positioned in risk areas in the Oise, Seine, and Marne.

- ServO also uses a thousand other sensors to locate water leaks in the pipes which cannot be detected by a person.

- ServO mobilises a hundred people: field operators in charge of repairing water cuts, heads of equipment maintenance stations, and technicians in charge of the various PLCs. All of the data can be viewed by each operator on a computer, tablet, or smartphone.

Customer benefits

Environment

• With the implementation of extremely complex treatment processes to guarantee a high level of quality, water is safe and reliable, and its quality exceeds European drinking water standards.

• The Integrated Management System meets various certifications: ISO 9001, ISO 14001, HACCP, OHSAS 18001, ISO 22000.

Savings

The drinking water network has an excellent efficiency rate which is close to 90 %.

Social/Societal

• The customer relationship has been innovated and modernised through the use of several tools:

• the Clario brand strives to develop and strengthen customer-focused activities and clarify its customer policy;

• the first Customer Relationship Centre NF Service-certified water service has over 560 000 customers;

• over 90 % of consumers are satisfied with their water (source: observatory on public water of SEDIF).

• 59 % apprenticeship contracts signed (contractual objectives: 20 %).

• 3.7 % employees trained every year.

• Veolia proposed to SEDIF the implementation of a comprehensive scheme accessible to all residents - L'Eau solidaire - whether they are direct customers of the service or not. The scheme provides emergency assistance to pay bills or charges related to the water service, assistance solutions to help resolve difficult situations (squats, planned home improvement operations, and damage to co-owned property) and prevention solutions to raise the population's awareness, with the help of partner associations, on reasonable water use and how to control their budget.

Each year, Veolia devotes 1 % of the revenue from the sale of water to solidarity actions with the population served by SEDIF. This will represent 25 million euros over the duration of the contract.