Performance Improvement in the Private Sector
Yorkshire Water and PwC built an AI‑enabled commercial control solution that shifts from manual, reactive checks to real‑time oversight across all third‑party spend. It delivers full assurance coverage, clearer insights and stronger supplier management, now being scaled across the business.
Yorkshire Water manages a multi-billion-pound asset base, spending around £1.2bn each year across hundreds of operational contracts that underpin essential public services. With capital investment set to increase significantly in the next regulatory period, a new approach to commercial assurance was needed to manage rising commercial risk.
Like many organisations, Yorkshire Water relied on traditional commercial assurance processes that were often manual and retrospective. As a result, issues were identified late, and operational teams lacked the evidence needed to challenge suppliers effectively.
PwC was engaged to help Yorkshire Water develop technology enabled cost controls to reduce leakage and improve decision-making across its most-material contracts. The organisation needed a scalable, preventative approach that could validate spend in real time, provide a single view of contract performance, and embed more consistent, evidence-based commercial management.
Working closely with Commercial, Procurement, Finance and operational teams, PwC co-developed Embedded Commercial Intelligence (ECI) – an AI-enabled capability that shifts assurance from retrospective review to real-time, preventative control. The solution brings contract terms, invoice data and operational information together in one place, enabling 100% validation of spend and offering actionable insights that help teams identify overbilling, non-compliance and operational inefficiencies earlier and more accurately.
The programme was delivered using a build–iterate–embed approach, to demonstrate value quickly and ensure the solution aligned with day-to-day working practices. Through ‘day in the life’ workshops, PwC and Yorkshire Water codified key commercial mechanisms, identified where value could leak and translated these risks into targeted assurance tests. Disparate datasets were cleansed and consolidated into a unified view, addressing long-standing issues such as inconsistent coding, missing fields and supplier format variations. By co-designing analytics, dashboards and workflows with contract managers, PwC ensured the solution was intuitive, practical and immediately usable.
The pilot demonstrated the power of realtime commercial intelligence. Assurance coverage increased from around 10% of spend to 100%, enabling contract managers to focus on genuine risks rather than manual checks. The pilot identified 2–3% commercial leakage, delivering a 4:1 ROI through immediate recoveries – and highlighting further opportunities to increase ROI to 12:1. Automated assurance delivered significant efficiency gains, eliminating manual, timeintensive processes and saving more than 30 hours per month on a key contract. Behavioural insights – such as identifying that 5–11% of fleetrelated charges stemmed from driver behaviour – enabled targeted interventions that would previously have been impossible.
Decision-making is now faster, more transparent and grounded in a single, trusted view of commercial performance. Operational teams report greater confidence in challenging suppliers, supported by clear audit trails and evidence-based insights. ECI has been embedded into routine contract management through training, playbooks and governance, and is now scaling to cover up to 39 contracts representing 60% of supplier spend. Contract managers describe ECI as a tool they “cannot do their jobs without”, reflecting a move from reactive issue-resolution to proactive, insight-led commercial control.
Overall, the programme has strengthened Yorkshire Water’s governance, improved transparency and positioned the organisation to manage its supply chain with far greater confidence.
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