Ongoing WaterWorX Project in Indonesia Aims at Ensuring Connection to Poor Area by Means of Financing
The “WaterWorX project: Water for Ten Million people”, teaming up VEI and Perumda Air Minum Tirta Moedal (PDAM) Semarang, Indonesia, has recently kicked off the first few missions within their Water Operator Partnership program. In one of its stages, a short-term expert is coming to assist PDAM in developing Water for Life proposal for ensuring connection to poor area by means of financing. Then proposal is set to be ready by February 2020.
On November 2019, a mission on optimizing the operation of water treatment plant Kudu is conducted with a surface water production expert in order to review, analyze and advise several improvement actions with regards to each treatment process. Included also the mission, some long-term recommendations concerning the uprating plan for the treatment plant in the future, as it is in water utility’s ambition to connect to as many customers as possible, delivering the best quality drinking water to more people.
On the same month, in their effort of improving customer satisfaction, PDAM welcomed the mission work of a customer relation expert from VEI. The three-week long mission was filled with interviews with all customer related departments, studying all the data regarding customer complaints and introduction to creating integrated customer complaint dashboard. PDAM realizes that several touchpoints in their customer journeys must be improved therefore an introductory workshop on dealing with the issue of intermittent supply was organized. The mission was then concluded with a plan of conducting a baseline customer survey that can be useful for monitoring the customer satisfaction and to make the improvement efforts measurable.
Reducing non-revenue water (NRW) is an important issue for PDAM. The current figure reaches 40% and PDAM wants to improve it by 10% during the first phase of the project. Currently the mission is still ongoing, with two short term experts coming to, among other things, analyze PDAM’s working methods and practices on analyzing NRW on company level, in the effort of reducing commercial losses, a top-down assessment on company level is also undertaken, in connection with assessing the related processes such as meter reading, billing and collection. In the project PDAM and VEI will jointly work together to reduce leakages and increase revenues in the Northern branch. This is a high density build area which is impacted largely by land subsidence. Due to land heightening the PDAM piped network has gone very deep underground even including the customer water meters. A big challenge ahead.
WaterWorX aims to ensure access of clean potable water to people in need. In this project, PDAM and VEI cooperate to connect low income area to the network and provide better quality water resource that is sustainable for the land. Groundwater extraction is a major problem in one of the PDAM coverage regions, namely Trimulyo, Eastern Semarang, with many houses having private abstractions via the private artesian wells and local government-coordinated water supply program. This issue is critical to be addressed, as already explained, especially in the coastal area where there is a lot of land subsidence and flooding. In this mission, a short-term expert is coming to assist PDAM in developing Water for Life proposal for ensuring connection to poor area by means of financing. Then proposal is set to be ready by February 2020.
