With a long history of working closely with the water industry, Henkel understands why it is important to conserve this vital resource. At every stage, preventing water loss and improving water quality reduces the strain on depleted reserves. One area with notoriously high water losses is the infrastructure connecting reservoirs and treatment plants with homes and businesses. Many water systems include decades-old, corroded components that cannot cope with modern demands and are difficult to monitor and repair. The resulting losses waste water and impact revenue, reducing the available funds for maintenance and modernisation.
While the water sector understands the need to modernise aging infrastructure, upgrades are expensive and raise the eternal question of ‘who pays?’ Compounding the problem, many existing solutions are fragmented and rely on different products and technologies. Because these are not always compatible, asset owners and engineers find it difficult to create long-term plans and decide where, when, and how to invest resources. To help the sector address water loss and develop fully-integrated solutions, Henkel set up it’s Water & Civil team focused on structure rehabilitation as part of its Infrastructure Protection and Repair group (IPR)
Why is Improving Water Infrastructure so Difficult?
Across the world, governments and the water sector are repairing and upgrading the tangled infrastructure needed to store, treat, and distribute water. However, maintaining complex water systems requires more than one simple solution, and owners may not even know where to start. Solutions are too often vendor-specific or restricted to certain regions, and frequently applied as reactive fixes rather than part of long term planning.
Another common issue is the knowledge silos that can separate organisations and even different departments, so they operate within their immediate environment and are aware only of their own problems. Naturally, this encourages inward-looking perspectives rather than solutions using external expertise, local experience, and multiple technologies. In a similar way, useful knowledge from different regions often remains trapped there, so others waste resources developing new approaches when research and real world tests already show what is feasible.
The problem of duplicated research also means that asset owners and engineers end up dealing with representatives from multiple companies, or multiple representatives from the same company, each trying to work out which products are compatible. They may have to build their own solutions even if they do not have experience of integrating different technologies. Ultimately, too much choice can force customers to make piecemeal, reactive changes rather than developing long-term solutions based upon pre-emptive planning.
Henkel’s Water and Civil Infrastructure Unit: Building a Portfolio
Understanding that facing a long list of vendors offering incompatible products confused clients, replicated research, and wasted resources, Henkel set up its Infrastructure Protection and Repair group with a specific unit on Water and Civil Infrastructure. The company felt that unifying the fragmented product portfolio would create better outcomes that benefit all stakeholders. Firstly, integrating water infrastructure technology at all levels and across all regions would support individual, customer-based solutions that reduce water loss, maximise resources, and deliver robust water systems. Secondly, bringing together Henkel’s comprehensive portfolio of products and decades of experience would encourage collaboration and streamline processes. All companies under the group could share knowledge and make sure that customers needed only one point of contact.
John Hepfinger, head of Henkel’s Water and Civil Infrastructure unit, noted that:
John Hepfinger
“What we’re really doing is building upon the base and platform that Henkel created, developing and bringing a suite and portfolio of solutions to the market in a more focused manner that creates a good structure for our customers. We can look across a broad spectrum of issues or even explore opportunities that our customers want to make.”
Breaking Down Silos
Since its formation, the IPR has helped Henkel concentrate its expertise across all of its companies and departments. Technicians and representatives gain knowledge of all products, understanding how they can work together to support customised plans that meet the client’s needs. Importantly, Henkel shares all product development and research across the group, maximising resources and freeing best practices from silos and the shroud of commercial secrecy.
More importantly, across its portfolio, Henkel can test how different products work together in support of customised solutions that use multiple elements. This collaboration also shaped the approach to challenges, where the lessons learned and the optimal solutions can spread throughout the organisation. Reinforcing this, Henkel’s global reach means it can export any ideas developed in one region to another and create a repository of shared knowledge. Minimising duplication uses resources more efficiently, while customers receive better solutions and benefit from savings at a time when the water sector is under pressure to reduce costs.
Focusing on Customers
One important characteristic of the W&C unit is the ability to assess exactly what customers need rather than fixating on technology. While research, innovation, and developing new products are important tools, using existing knowledge to craft pragmatic, market-facing solutions is often the best starting place. As John points out:
“The creation of this group brings the technologies together and becomes more market facing. We were in our little silos thinking this is the right technology for this solution, but as we’ve acquired and brought together different technologies, different groups, and different ways of approaching asset owners, there’s a way to bring together a cohesive approach.”
Another benefit to customers is the well-known Henkel name, giving a single point of contact without sacrificing the sectoral and regional familiarity of the brands making up the portfolio. Customers already have an idea of what the products can do but can shift their perception slightly, seeing each as one potential component of a full solution. John notes how the unified approach has streamlined the entire customer experience:
We try to think about the issue from the perspective of the customer, whether they are a consulting engineer, a contractor, a municipality, or an industrial facility. They each have different needs, requirements, and ways they like to work. Again, this is all on a global basis. This benefits the company and also our customers because we don’t have competing people confusing them.
When working with customers to develop optimal solutions for improving water infrastructure, Henkel prefers to extend the life of assets through rehabilitation. Not only is this cost effective, but it minimises disruption for surrounding communities and the environment. Through a single point of contact, the client, contractors, and community groups can work together and contribute ideas rather than trying to navigate through a maze of different companies and departments.
Where the Local Meets the Global
While water infrastructure is often discussed as a monolith, in reality, every system is different and evolved to meet different needs and operating conditions. Trying to implement the same technologies in every situation, without understanding the customer’s system and perspective, often falls short. By ensuring that representatives and technicians possess knowledge of the local area, the W&CI group bridges that gap. The organisation blends its knowledge with local understanding of the operating environment, legislation, and links with surrounding communities and contractors. This enhances the ability to tailor solutions and technologies while ensuring that local stakeholders feel they have ownership of the solution. John points out that:
“You start thinking about multiple stakeholders. You’re thinking not only about the asset owner in the region, but what’s the impact to the community? What’s the impact to the installation, the installers, the contractor partners? How can you help them be more efficient? We’re working with other suppliers so are we compatible with their materials? We have three customers. We think about the asset owners, the engineer, and then the contractors, typically the one we have the transaction with. And then, the public is our other customer.”
Structural reinforcement work inside a large-diameter water infrastructure asset.
Maximising Shrinking Budgets
In an ideal world, all aging water infrastructure would be quickly replaced to plug leaks and install the latest technologies, but this is not practical as budgets are always a constraint. Water operators are in a difficult situation because they are under pressure from governments to fix leaks, but they cannot pass additional costs to customers. Domestic users are experiencing a cost of living crisis and businesses face soaring energy costs, while governments are reluctant to raise taxes. John stresses the importance of doing more with less:
“The whole idea is to extend the life of the assets. Everyone’s challenged with budgets. How can we be more efficient with the funding we do have? How can we help the owners get more out of what they’ve got? There’s always a need for some new construction, but how can we create an opportunity for them to use their budgets more wisely?”
To answer the question and create the opportunities, the W&C unit focuses on extending the life of assets without a significant drop in performance when compared to new systems. By rolling together the various products and technologies under one group, it is easier to find a rehabilitation option that is cost effective and helps stretch budgets further. John also believes that the approach can actually exceed what the customer expects:
“So, as we encourage our customers to think about rehabilitation, we’re allowing them to work within the confines of their budgets and do more work than maybe they had planned to.”
Other than the potential to reduce costs upfront, rehabilitation can save resources in the long term through reduced maintenance, lower revenue losses, reduced energy costs for pumping and treatment, and helping avoid expensive catastrophic failures. For some asset owners, the ability to shift between capex and opex budgets is also very useful.
Meeting New Challenges
Of course, while the W&C unit has helped Henkel draw together its growing product portfolio, there are always challenges to overcome. For example, while the group has allowed Henkel to expand into other regions, this means that the company faces new issues, such as adapting to multiple standards and regulations across jurisdictions. As John points out:
“You have country standards, regional standards, and other local standards that you need to navigate. You have embedded technologies or embedded companies that have been there prior to us. But the good thing is, with Henkel, we have that credibility. We need that symbiotic relationship and support to ensure that we have success because nobody wants a failure. Nobody wants to come back. People are trusting us that we’re going to give 50, 75, 100-year design life and that’s what we’re staking our reputation on.”
Overall, as part of the ongoing process, it is vital to make sure that local knowledge underpins flexible solutions, providing a sense of adaptability that treats every client and every project on their own merits. By connecting asset owners, engineers, contractors, and communities, the W&C unit will continue to look for ways to promote collaboration.
