National Municipal Benchmarking Initiative for Water Services

The National Municipal Benchmarking Initiative (MBI) for Water Services was re-launched during 2011 by SALGA and WRC. The primary objective of the initiative is to support improved municipal water services provision through benchmarking. A consortium of practitioners specialising in water services, benchmarking and performance measurement, information systems and business intelligence from Emanti Management, PDG, Counterpoint Development and Maluti Water have been appointed as service providers to support and drive this exciting project. Importantly, both IMESA and eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality are project partners and will assist in ensuring that the MBI is indeed “for municipalities, by municipalities, to the benefit of municipalities”.

The programme (with municipal interactions which commenced in August 2011) will both build on the learning’s from South Africa’s previous benchmarking initiative (2005 to 2008) and those of other international initiatives, will in particicular aim to use water services benchmarking to strive for continual operational performance improvement by municipalities, while building on the experience of their peers to make the most efficient use of available resource to improve service delivery and customer services.

The Proposed New Approach

• Make benchmarking part of “normal, good business practice” that assists officials with their day-to-day operations and demonstrates economic benefits and value to the water services sector.
• Focus on hands-on support (“how do I do that?”).
• Create a support network and culture of information exchange between peers (“how did they do that?”).
• Use a web-based real-time data-capture and reporting system for tracking and measuring performance.
• Use a modular, tiered approach to benchmarking to encourage and enable all to participate, at a level aligned with their current capabilities and future aspirations.

The Proposed Draft Modules:
Below are the proposed modules to be initially considered (in no particular order):

In the future, additional modules will be introduced (as requested). In addition, if the benchmarking of Water Services proves successful, the initiative could be expanded to other Municipal Services (e.g. roads, traffic).

Participation based on the Water Services Institutions capacity to participate, Water Services Institutions will be guided to the appropriate entry level of initial participation and thereafter encouraged and supported to progress incrementally. A key feature of the approach is the access to and use of existing Municipal data available on other databases to the benefit of Municipal Benchmarking. This will reduce the need for need for Municipalities to input data (i.e. avoid duplication of effort).