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the Thames Water and supplier teams have become co-located in a purpose built centre. KPIs and the commercial model have been refined and aligned. “We’ve got to a point now where we have a very mature contract and very, very mature commercial model which is the envy of the industry,” says Loveday. It would be easy to suggest that the sole driving force behind the transformation of Thames Water’s whole approach to its supplier network is just improving the relationships and focusing on the bottom line. Loveday, though, is keen to stress that the transformation was born out of a base level need to improve the company’s operational performance. Thames Water, as noted previously, has more than 12,000 people working every day on its assets, including 5,000 direct staff, but with no commercial strategy in place it was clear that there was also something else missing: alignment. “Previously there was a focus on the direct staff, despite the large numbers of contractors we
had working on projects for us,” says Loveday. “We just seemed to ignore them and yet many are in customer facing roles.” Loveday set out to and rebranded all of the customer facing roles so that everyone wore the same uniforms and drove the same vehicles. It made commercial sense, but also from an operational and customer perspective is started to align behaviour towards customer service instead of the individual needs of companies. Next up was alliancing, for Loveday, was very symbolic as it represented a new way of working, shared outcomes rather than traditional rate-based contracts. “What we did from a behavioural standpoint is align people to a new vision for the organisation, a new set of values,” he says. “It was critical in getting not only the Thames Water people aligned but more importantly, getting the suppliers aligned around one vison.” By establishing a more alliance based approach, this allows Thames Water to create more customer focused contracts that enables more
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