WJA Member Spotlight: Andrew Dobson, Regional Manager, Veolia
What water jetting services do you deliver?
Veolia is the UK’s leading resource management company and a global provider of industrial, waste, water and energy services. We provide a full range of hydroblasting services to customers across the UK and Europe, working with our colleagues at SODI, in France and Germany, and HCI, which operates across Belgium, the Netherlands and Scandinavia.
We provide high and ultra-high pressure water jetting services, including robotic tank cleaning, chemical cleaning, abrasive water jet cold cutting, catalyst handling, drain cleaning and CCTV surveying across many industrial sectors.
Veolia works closely with the WJA in the UK and with its counterparts in other territories – SIR, AUSJET and the WJTA – to ensure we operate to the highest standards at all times, in compliance with each of these organisations.
What are the three most important elements of service delivery for your customers and why?
Safety, reliability and productivity are non-negotiable when working with all our customers across many diverse industries. These three pillars shape all of the solutions we deliver for our clients and in managing the safety of our people, which is paramount.
Firstly, we recognise that having a strong safety record is a prerequisite for our clients. Secondly, the reliability of our equipment is critical. We use our experience and know-how to invest heavily in the best pump and jetting technology and to develop our high-performance supply chain, both being key to Veolia achieving its goals. Finally, the productivity and attainment of our service must meet the objectives of our clients. This is delivered through our employees’ skills, knowledge and experience.
What have been the business highlights for Veolia over the last 12 months?
Working in an organisation with 218,000 employees across 57 countries brings many advantages. Building relationships with the industrial services network across Europe has been the highlight in recent years. We have delivered major projects in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and across the UK during the past year. Diversifying our business and building a network with new colleagues has been hugely rewarding.
What’s the biggest change in technology or process you have witnessed in your service sector in recent years?
The design and engineering of new solutions is rapidly expanding, along with constantly evolving products to automate the high-risk activities of our industry, which is fantastic and a pleasure to be part of. We are providing critical feedback that is an essential part in the research and development process to ensure safety and improve productivity.
The challenge for contractors is to demonstrate value to industry and how paying more now for the research, design engineering and execution actually means paying less by returning assets quicker, cleaner and more efficiently to the end user for production purposes.
What do you think will be the biggest changes or challenges over the next 10 years?
How we manage and use natural resources such as water, oil and energy in our business is becoming of prime importance to the industries we serve. This means we must continue to evolve, and work collaboratively across all organisations to find solutions, particularly for high-performance and high-powered assets, which require high levels of energy but give our clients so much value.
What are you most proud of about the way your team supports your customers?
We recognise that recruitment is an incredibly difficult and a financially high-risk process. So Veolia places a strong emphasis on succession planning to meet our needs and the aspirations of our employees.
We take huge pride in seeing our employees go from strength-to-strength through different experiences, training and responsibility, to lead major projects with clients. We have aspiring employees making their way from the shop floor to management plus graduate apprenticeship programmes that are delivering the future of our business.
Why did Veolia decide to join the WJA?
As one of the WJA’s original members, we believe we are guardians of the association to ensure we uphold the principles and core belief that nobody should get hurt in the work they do. We believe that everyone providing hydroblasting services must commit to following the WJA codes of practice, train their teams to understand the risks involved and make every attempt to automate and control water jetting systems to protect their people. We are committed to the WJA and support its standards at every opportunity.
What do you think are the WJA’s biggest achievements?
We have witnessed how the WJA has evolved over the years and is now recognised widely as the reference point across UK industries for all forms of water jetting. We will watch with interest how the WJA grows and meets the challenges of an environmentally-conscious world, supporting a growing range of water jetting activities, and will do all we can to support its critically important work.