How Europe’s water utilities can face ageing infrastructure and regulations without doubling staff
"When the well is dry, we'll know the worth of water," Benjamin Franklin famously noted. This resonates particularly in Sicily, where wells have dried up this summer, forcing residents to buy large tanks to hoard water.
Sicily and Italy are the most extreme examples of a problem facing Europe's water systems: leaks. Italian cities lose a staggering 42% of their water to them, making the country the worst performer in Europe. On average, roughly 25% of treated water in the EU is lost before it reaches consumers. In the UK, that figure is about 19%, or 2.7 billion litres a day. The European Commission is calling for a 10% reduction in water use by 2030, largely through leak reduction.
This problem also reflects the complex reality water services face: their systems are old, rules are tightening and staff are retiring rapidly. In some utilities, up to half of the field and operations personnel could retire within 15 years.
Italy is the most extreme example of a problem facing Europe's water systems: leaks. Italian cities lose 42% of their water to leaks
At the same time, external pressures are increasing. Utilities must filter out microplastics, monitor emerging contaminants and prepare for more frequent droughts and floods. The cost of energy and chemicals has also risen sharply since 2021.
The result is a sector that must do more with rising costs and a shrinking workforce. Digital tools can help meet the moment, but they need to be rapidly effective, cost-efficient and can't create new work.
In this article, we present a four-pillar strategy that meets these criteria and has been implemented, fully or in part, by several major operators across the continent. It relies on several solutions within Hexagon’s portfolio that address these operational and regulatory challenges holistically, from asset management to compliance monitoring.
The foundation: establishing a single operational record
Water companies typically operate with very fragmented and siloed systems. Many utilities still depend on paper logs, spreadsheets or custom applications that don't communicate with each other. Information often varies in granularity, completeness and accuracy.
This fragmentation leads to several consequences.
At a wastewater treatment plant, where maintenance accounts for 15% to 25% of total operational costs, poor data management carries direct costs
The primary one is inflated maintenance budgets. At a wastewater treatment plant, where maintenance typically accounts for 15% to 25% of total operational costs, poor data management carries significant direct costs.
This number doesn't even account for indirect costs, such as the time wasted by maintenance teams acting on inconsistent or outdated information. This is particularly detrimental when an incident occurs, as it leads to slow, ineffective responses and costly repairs. Lastly, when regulators request evidence of maintenance or investment, staff must extract and reconcile data from several systems, a process that can take days.
A unified asset and maintenance platform addresses these gaps. A powerful combination integrates a cloud GIS, such as HxGN NetWorks, with an Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) platform. This connects geospatial network data with asset condition and maintenance information to provide a single operational view of the network.
Take the example of Milan, one of Italy’s best-performing areas for drinking water loss. Gruppo CAP, which manages water and wastewater services for more than two million people around the city, moved from spreadsheets and paper records to a single asset management system. Using Hexagon’s HxGN EAM, the company consolidated all equipment, maintenance and field data. This shift provided a single view of the network and allowed the utility to prioritise repairs and investments based on asset performance.
This work is foundational; without it, teams across the companies are pouring their energy into broken processes and might end up too busy to improve.
Taming alarm systems and accelerating response
Delays in identifying and repairing leaks are also often a symptom of poor coordination. Many control rooms still rely on radio calls, paper maps or static GIS displays. A pressure drop may trigger hundreds of alarms and leave operators to triage manually.
Real-time network management systems can shorten that cycle. HxGN InService combines network modelling, telemetry and mobile workforce management. When a pressure anomaly occurs, the system maps the affected area, identifies isolation valves and locates the nearest crew. Dispatchers send instructions directly to tablets, which reduces the time from alarm to on-site response.
External pressures are increasing; utilities must filter out microplastics, monitor emerging contaminants and prepare for more droughts and floods
This integration of data and dispatch can cut incident duration from hours to minutes, which makes a significant financial difference. It also produces a full record of actions taken, useful for internal review and regulatory reporting. For utilities facing stricter service continuity targets, such coordination is one of the few practical ways to meet performance metrics without expanding staff.
Digitising routine operations (without adding complexity)
Another area to examine for freeing up time and resources is routine documentation and daily operational processes. Every day, hundreds of operators fill in inspection sheets, shift logs and event reports, often by hand. While these records are crucial for safety and compliance, they're cumbersome to process. Information may sit in folders for days before review, making it less useful for decision-making. That's a shame because, when this information is effectively digitised and accessible, it can prove a gold mine to analyse and improve work processes.
That's why several utilities have replaced paper with structured electronic logs. At a major utility in the UK, Hexagon’s j5 Operations Management was introduced to standardise how events, handovers and instructions are recorded. Operators now enter data into a single digital logbook that updates in real time across sites. Escalation steps are embedded in the software, ensuring that serious incidents trigger immediate notification to supervisors.
This kind of standardisation matters for two reasons. It enforces consistency across shifts and locations, and it creates usable data for trend analysis. Instead of aggregating handwritten forms, managers can pull incident counts, maintenance intervals or near-miss reports directly from the system.
A backbone that makes compliance an integral part of operations
Video management tools like Hexagon’s Qognify record physical incidents, while j5 logs operational actions and HxGN EAM tracks maintenance
This consistency also matters at a time when operators face a growing compliance burden. 2024 saw a sweeping revision of the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive (UWWTD), which was positively received by the industry for its extension of the Polluter Pays Principle. However, it also imposes obligations on building and operating assets for quaternary treatment, increasing sampling and monitoring, providing tariff payers with compliance and cost data and achieving energy neutrality.
And the UWWTD is not the only text being revised. For example, the NIS2 directive, which covers drinking water and wastewater as essential services, requires rapid incident response and reporting and detailed recovery plans.
This regulatory context largely points to the same direction: operators where compliance is a cumbersome manual process stand to lose and spend an ever-increasing amount of time compiling data. Manual reporting cannot keep up with the pace, but integrated digital systems can.
Beyond regulation, a complete operational record allows managers to analyse the cost and frequency of incidents and improve risk assessment
Consider leaks and the obligation to report performance publicly. Video management tools like Hexagon’s Qognify record physical incidents, while j5 logs operational actions and HxGN EAM tracks maintenance. Together, they form a verifiable timeline of events. For instance, if an alarm leads to a shutdown, the sequence, from first alert to restart, can be automatically reconstructed.
Beyond regulation, a complete operational record allows managers to analyse the cost and frequency of incidents and improve risk assessment. With intense public scrutiny of spills and overflows, automatic traceability reduces both administrative burden and reputational exposure.
This example, like the others in this article, points to the same truth. For water operators, the current context offers a way up and a way down.
The way down is to keep pouring water into already leaky buckets: fragmented systems, maintenance teams flying blind, manual data consolidation feeding a growing compliance burden. The way up is to use a solid digital foundation to improve processes, recover margins and simplify compliance. As the example of Sicily shows, what’s at stake is not only the financial solvency of utilities. It’s also the ability to maintain service continuity and an affordable water supply under stress.