Introduction
As part of our 2020/21 Business Plan, we made the commitment to being more open and transparent about our performance as market operator. This includes the progress we have made against our newly defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and progress against our business plan commitments.
In order to adopt a holistic approach to our performance reporting, this quarter and moving forward, we will be publishing our Quarterly Report alongside performance against our KPIs – the latter of which was first introduced through the publication of our enhanced Annual Report and Financial Statements in July.
In publishing both sets of reports, we aim to be completely transparent on our performance – outlining any trends, key successes and where applicable, if we have not delivered against key quarter milestones.
On this page, you will find a link to MOSL’s Q2 Quarterly Report. You will also be able to scroll down through our KPIs metrics and accompanying narrative.
About our Business Plan
The overarching theme of our 2020/21 Business Plan is to make it ‘easier to do business’ in the water retail market. This is supported by five key themes; Service Excellence, Market Assurance, Market Improvement, Governance and Building Capability. Under each of these themes we made a number of commitments to support improvements within MOSL and across the market. Progress against these commitments is outlined in our Q2 Quarterly Report.
Quarterly Report
In our second Quarterly Report, we have taken onboard feedback from stakeholders following publication of the Q1 report in July. As such, this report includes a slightly different layout, a completion status against each of the key themes and a dedicated risk and issues section for each of the commitments. We have also included a clear articulation of deliverables for this quarter, as well as the upcoming quarter.
MOSL's Key Services and KPIs
In developing the new suite of services, we have defined a number metrics, which show the size and complexity of each service, and a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to help track our performance over time. In July we reported against 21 KPIs and 60 metrics across the four main service categories. In order to achieve a clear balance of transparency and clarity, we have simplified the number of metrics and KPIs we will report on 21 KPIs and 30 metrics.
If you scroll down, you will find this quarter's performance against our KPIs and metrics along with the accompanying trends and narrative.
Market Operation
Registration, switching and financial settlement
New SPIDs registered have fallen by 53 per cent compared to the same time last year. Existing SPIDs which have been deregistered have fallen by 71 per cent and SPIDs switched to new supplier are down 45 per cent compared to this time last year.
Planned settlement runs
Additional catch-up RF settlement runs were run for April to September 2019. One hundred per cent of all planned settlement runs were delivered on time. This is an improvement on last year's position where MOSL delivered 97.2 per cent of these runs on time.
Unplanned settlement runs
Due primarily to COVID-19, there have been 92 unplanned settlement runs this year to date. This represents a 46 per cent increase from last year. However, our delivery lead time was almost half - with the average lead time now six days compared to 11 days last year.
Market systems
CMOS availability and service desk performance has been consistently high this year with five out of eight KPIs scoring 100 per cent.
There has also been a change in service level agreements for the following three KPIs:
- System availability during the working day - this target has changed from 99.85 per cent to 99.90 per cent
- Transaction processing response time - this target has changed from 95 per cent within 15 minutes to 96.5 per cent within 15 minutes
- Portal/screen response time - this target has changed from 95 per cent within 15 minutes to 96.5 per cent within 15 minutes.
Service Desk (within Service Level Agreement)
One P2 issue breached the target fix time SLA. The incident was resolved in eight hours and twelve minutes compared to the target of eight hours. Root cause analysis was undertaken and the learnings were documented.
New releases
There have been two CMOS releases this year to date, both were delivered on time, and with fewer defects identified in the MPS2 test environment.
Market Assurance
Entry, exit and reassurance
- ConservAqua Ltd, J Sainsbury PLC and Sefton Council joined the market this year
- Three Sixty Water Ltd left the market as part of a planned exit following Business Stream's acquisition of business customers of the Kelda Group.
Performance and risk
Performance charges were suspended for the first half of 2020/21 due to COVID-19 impacts on operational services. As a result, task volumes have reduced significantly.
Compliance and audit
Market Operator Compliance remains at 99 per cent as per the first two quarterly internal assessments. Two independent reviews on trading party compliance have taken place during this period. Both reviews focused on COVID-19-related matters – one focused on deferred payment submissions and the other reviewed temporary changes to vacancy. Further review work is in progress on the unwinding of COVID-related vacancies.
Market Improvement
Strategic market development
The introduction of temporary COVID-19 measures allowing temporary vacancy flags to be used has had a significant effect on the market levels of premises showing as vacant in CMOS. This followed a gradual reduction in this measure as part of the Market Performance Operating Plan (MPOP) focused workstreams. The unwinding of COVID-19 measures is being closely monitored and plans will be reintroduced to encourage collaborative working between wholesalers and retailers to accurately reflect customers occupancy status and consumption.
Change delivery
Change assessment times increased in Q2 due to five changes that were recommended to Ofwat by the Panel in this quarter.
Two of these - CPW059: ‘Changes to review obligations’ and CPW067: ‘Bulk submissions of service requests via MS Excel’ – were recommended to Ofwat in 2019 but were returned for further work. CPW069: ‘Right of a retailer to appoint an accredited entity’ was first considered by the Panel in 2019 and returned for further assessment.
CPW075: ‘Remove estimated meter readings when forward estimating’ and CPW085: ‘Premise vacant link to DPID’ were also recommended in this period.
Many of these changes were complex requiring expert input from industry groups. This, together with the need for trading parties to reprioritise resources to focus on challenges relating to COVID-19, resulted in an extended assessment period for these changes.
Governance and Support Services
Secretariat
This year the Panel has held 10 meetings, six more compared to the same period last year. These have been driven by COVID-19 related activities. Some of these Panel meetings have been called with as little as 48 hours notice and urgent changes have been processed and implemented within 72 hours. Panel and committee papers were issued on time 95.4 per cent of the time, up from 93 per cent last year.
Maintenance and development of the market codes
There have been 10 updates to the Market Arrangements Code (MAC) and 16 updates to the Wholesale Retail Code (WRC) this year to date. This is a significant increase compared to the same period last year driven by COVID-19 related changes.
Building Capability
Our people
We have continued to focus on building our team's capability and to monitor colleague engagement. Our Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) has risen to 53 points this year and our engagement and response rate has increased from 91 per cent to 97 per cent. Our Glassdoor employer score remains at 3.8.
Summary
Thank you for reading our Quarterly Report and performance against our KPIs and key metrics. We are continually looking at ways in which to improve the way we present and make information available to you. If you would like any further information on the reports or would like to provide feedback, please email comms@mosl.co.uk.