United Utilities Policy Prioritisation Management Tool (PPMT)

WRc have worked with United Utilities (UU) and strategy consultancy - Catalyze, on the development of a Policy Prioritisation Management Tool (PPMT) to aid UU’s decision making processes in business planning.  The tool allows UU to construct the most efficient and cost beneficial mix of strategies or projects across the business or within a particular area taking into account benefits applying to different stakeholders.

PPMT is a decision modelling tool made up of data capture and gap analysis spreadsheet based tools, developed by WRc which sit around Equity 3, a multi criteria decision analysis (MCDA) application developed by Catalyze.

Costs and benefit scores for various strategies or projects are entered using the data capture tool which then performs calculations on the data before it is input in a suitable format for use in Equity 3 where the MCDA is performed. 

The output is a prioritised list of strategies or projects which can then be imported into a gap analysis.  This can be used to show the predicted affect of implementing a particular set of strategies on performance in terms of serviceability or OPA scores for example.

UU is using the tool to compare and prioritise various strategies across the water and wastewater areas of the business.