Southern Water: Balanced Scorecard Embedded Across Every Key Framework Through the AMP Transition

The Situation

Southern Water provides water and wastewater services to 4.6 million customers across Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. The move from one AMP cycle to the next is the point at which a water company’s regulatory commitments, capital programme and supplier base all reset at once, and Southern Water reached that point with major transformation programmes already under way.

With an extensive supplier base, demanding compliance requirements and a new investment period to mobilise, the procurement function needed three things it did not yet have in a consistent form: a single way of measuring and incentivising delivery partner performance, a governance model that senior stakeholders would actually use, and forward planning that lined procurement up with what the business would need over the next five years.

What We Did

Pro Outsourcing joined Southern Water in July 2024 and remains embedded in the procurement function. Tom Evans MCIPS leads the work across governance, supplier performance and transformation. It has included:

• Designing and implementing the Balanced Scorecard across all key frameworks and delivery partners, with consistent KPIs, evidence-based scoring and incentive mechanisms that tie payment to performance. The scorecard now covers the delivery partners on the company’s major frameworks, and work continues on making the monthly submission process faster for suppliers and the team.
• Building and running the Business Engagement Model: a regular cycle of senior stakeholder engagement backed by monthly analytics dashboards, so decisions are made on data rather than anecdote.
• Strengthening procurement planning and forecasting so that the pipeline for the new AMP period was visible, sequenced and resourced before it was needed.
• Driving procurement governance improvements to keep the function compliant with the Procurement Act, the Utilities Contracts Regulations and the company’s sustainability objectives.
• Leading procurement communications, including the internal procurement homepage, and the engagement programme for company-wide and procurement-specific transformation.
• Mobilising the fleet management and telematics contract and project managing the electric vehicle rollout trial, including driver criteria, site readiness and home charging policy.

The Results

Southern Water now measures every key framework and delivery partner on the same Balanced Scorecard, with supplier performance visible month by month and incentives linked to evidence. Senior stakeholders are aligned around standard processes, decisions and governance, which the client describes below as rarely straightforward in an organisation of its scale. The AMP transition was planned and communicated as a programme rather than absorbed as a shock.

The engagement is ongoing. Current work is focused on making scorecard submissions more efficient and on extending the same discipline to the wider supplier base.