Edelle, for England and Wales the attached Ofwat document lists KPIs for the water industry including compliance with discharge consents.

John

Hi John, thank you for your answer. I have come across the Ofwat indicaters during my research. Have you had any experience with them? I am curious to see peoples opinions/reactions to different KPI frameworks. Some people prefer extensive lists of KPIs, some prefer a few concise but effective KPIs.

Hi again Edelle, yes, I worked in the water industry throughout the periods of change when KPIs were implemented. The more KPIs you have the more resources you need to implement and report against them and, initially, the more resistance there can be to their implementation. Most important,  KPIs must be realistic, measurable and achievable; and agreed by all who need to be involved. If you look at the key indicators on the Ofwat page (first link attached) you will see that, for a complex industry, the water / waste water indicators are relatively few (compared to what might be possible) and quite overarching. However, If you look at the detail of each indicator (second link) you realise the seemingly  'simple' indicators are actually quite complex and require a great deal of effort to implement report against. The list you see was not implemented as is, they were arrived at by trial and error over a number of years. The trial and error process involved a lot of time and change to working practices and data collection / reporting systems. As well as the regulatory imposed indicators, companies may have other KPIs they think relevant for explaining their performance to customers. For example, each of your waste water treatment plants may have different operational requirements and processes / process control dependent upon the influent type and volumes, and whether they generate power or heat as a by-product. It might be necessary, or nice to have, to measure and report specific process efficiency within each treatment plant. Again this impacts upon resources and the Ofwat environmental KPIs encompass this sub reporting as it all contributes to the same pollution incident measurement. As a researcher I have found some water companies very helpful if approached with questions like yours and often they will allow you to visit to discuss KPI implementation with someone who was directly involved with their introduction, implementation, and iterative evolution to their current status. 

http://www.ofwat.gov.uk/regulating/compliance/reportingperformance/kpi/indicator

http://www.ofwat.gov.uk/regulating/compliance/reportingperformance/kpi/prs_web_kpidefns.xlsx

Thank you very much for your excellent answer John. I am of the same belief, that simplicity and effectiveness should be a combined goal. Thank you very much for both links, the excel file is most helpful!

Throughout the development of my own KPI framework focusing on WWTP performance and resource efficiency, I have learned similar lessons on creating achievable KPIs among others. Once this toolkit is complete I will be sending it for comments and beta testing to interested stakeholders, therefore it is nice to get general opinions on KPIs for now. I hope that one day Irish wastewater infrastructure will adopt a KPI framework similar to the Ofwat framework.

Thank you again for your in-depth answer, it is greatly appreciated.

In Manitoba, Canada only indicators used are total faecal coliforms, E.Coli, BOD, COD and SS. The values used are higher than many other jurisdictions. We only have one industrial plant (I helped design) that has requirements for soluble phosphate and total nitrogen. This is the only plant that removes phosphates and converts ammonia and nitrate to nitrogen gas.

The KPI's in the USA tend to be location specific given the wide variability of the issues. Also, these WW treatment KPI's are part of the overall enterprise KPI framework, and the same technology is used to implement both. Lately CSO management has dominated the picture for several utilities and high-rate treatment is a popular option. So traditional KPI calculations won't work for such utilties. Having implemented a few KPI frameworks over past several years in a variety of different technologies, I think that the best frameworks are those that integrate efficiently into the existing data-streams and allow easy modifications including user driven changes. There  are some new efforts in Ohio with focus on small to mid utilities. It will be interesting to compare your work with those initiatives.