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April 23, 2024

Scottish Water uses Copilot for Microsoft 365 to eliminate mundane tasks and free up time for work that really matters

Water is the planet’s most precious resource. It is life. In Scotland, Scottish Water’s 4,500 people provide water and wastewater services to 2.6 million households. In addition to field operations and the treatment works themselves, digitalisation plays a big role at Scottish Water: it helps the company to analyse the water cycle and better understand water demand. This crucial work is often interrupted by tedious tasks that keep people from doing what they love most—delivering safe drinking water to Scotland’s homes and recycling waste water in ways that are good for the environment. Reducing mundane tasks to a minimum, and thus freeing up time for employees to work on the more meaningful tasks, makes for an even more motivated workforce. This is exactly what Scottish Water achieved when it implemented Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Scottish Water

Further lifting the level of purposeful work at Scottish Water

Picture 230 water treatment works supplying 1.52 billion litres of water per day to Scottish households through a total of 50,000 kilometres of water mains. Then add the 1,800 treatment works that collect and treat over 900 million litres of wastewater from Scottish homes, businesses, and industrial sites. That’s the critical infrastructure that the people at Scottish Water need to do what they love. “We look after Scotland’s most precious natural resource: water—from source to sea. It’s our responsibility to deliver water and provide wastewater services to Scottish homes and businesses every day,” says John Cairney, Head of Digital Strategy & Architecture / CTO at Scottish Water. “To do this, we rely heavily on operational technology and IT: mobile devices, smart devices, laptops, sensor technology, analytics software and, of course, workplace technology and software.” No matter whether the focus is on the science of supply or operations, Scottish Water always wants to give its people tasks and projects they can be proud of. After all, that’s why they joined Scottish Water in the first place. And the company wants to give them the latest technology to reduce the amount of manual, mundane tasks. We’ve all been there: meetings where some people talk while others take notes or write minutes, some people come in late and miss the most important points, and still others can’t remember what was discussed at last month’s meeting so they start riffling through their notes. “It actually makes me really sad,” says Andrea McCheyne, Transformation Manager at Scottish Water. “Meetings like that are less engaging for some people, aren’t they? Also, writing minutes and structuring actions afterwards is so time-consuming. It takes our people away from much more meaningful tasks.” And there are many other similar tasks, including reading and summarising large documents, creating a new Word document and staring at a blank page until inspiration strikes, creating a new communication asset such as an email or presentation, and combing through large datasets to track down a particular piece of information.

“We call it ‘lifting the level of work’,” Cairney explains. “We’re already working with our data scientists to explore where we can use traditional artificial intelligence. And now that generative AI has reached a high level of maturity, we decided to make it available to a wider spectrum of our employees as well.” As part of an early access program, Scottish Water implemented Copilot for Microsoft 365 to reduce the time needed to perform mundane tasks and thus free up more time for more meaningful work.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 increases productivity and allows team members to focus on more meaningful tasks

Scottish Water is seeing a great uptake of Copilot in conjunction with all traditional Office applications, especially Microsoft Teams, Word, and Outlook. Employees use it to help organise their daily schedule, to minute meetings, or to create new documents. “In our best week, we saved around 200 hours across all Copilot users. That’s time that we can now spend on more meaningful tasks directly related to improving our customers’ experience,” Cairney says.

Based on feedback from across Scottish Water, the Teams use case is the one that brings the most relief to employees, and it is clear why. As long as a meeting has a transcript, Copilot can be used to answer any questions that participants may have: Can you summarise the meeting? What were the main points discussed? What tasks were assigned to whom? “Copilot gives us all the answers we might need about a meeting in a matter of seconds,” McCheyne says. “This completely eliminates the need to take notes, manually summarise a meeting, or prepare a post-meeting report. It increases post-meeting productivity and saves a huge amount of time.” No more searching through handwritten notes for points made in a meeting a week ago. Just ask a quick question in Copilot and the answers appear. 

What’s more, this allows meeting participants to be fully present. They listen, they engage, and there is more conversation in the meeting. “Copilot helps people to focus more on what’s being discussed in meetings, which in turn makes the meetings much more effective,” McCheyne says. “Also, after a meeting, I can ask Copilot about my presentation style, for example, if there was enough time for questions between topics, or how engaged the other participants were.” This adds an educational aspect to meetings and helps to improve how we prepare and run them, which has a positive effect on both quality and, of course, meeting time.

McCheyne is noticing a huge upswing in productivity relating to the creation of any type of communication or text: “Everyone knows the blank page syndrome, where you’re sitting in front of an empty document and it takes a while to get started because you’re lacking inspiration or information. Copilot eliminates this completely. You just tell it what you want to write, what information the document or email should contain, and it suggests a structure, a text, or whatever you need.” 

People in analyst roles can now ask Copilot to explain code or datasets, saving them a lot of time that they would otherwise spend searching for useful information or calling a colleague for help. “A very important return on our investment in Copilot is not necessarily the time itself, but the much higher quality of work we create for our people by implementing such technologies,” McCheyne explains. 

It’s all about spending less time on tedious tasks so that there’s more to spend on the ones that really matter. Cairney explains: “The name Copilot is one of Microsoft’s best ideas yet because it is so spot on: the solution works like a copilot, an assistant that takes over those tasks that keep you from doing work that holds more purpose. For our people, that’s delivering water to Scotland’s homes. Going forward, Scottish Water will continue to focus on the areas where Copilot has been most successful and learn from them. The plan is then to roll Copilot out to all employees so they can spend more time doing the work they are rightly proud of.

“A very important return on our investment in Copilot is not necessarily the time itself, but the much higher quality of work we create for our people by implementing such technologies.”

Andrea McCheyne, Transformation Manager, Scottish Water

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