Getting paid
Most consumers (households and institutions) had water meters, but these rarely worked. Even if they worked, the meters often went unread. When read, bills were not always sent. Sent bills were not always paid. Basically, the revenues of FEGAWS came from the actual consumption of some large customers and flat connection charges that had nothing to do with actual consumption.
There were some 300.000 house connections with water meters. Water meters that would require cleaning and calibration every 10 years. The required capacity of the water meter workshop to do this would be about 30.000 per year, say 150 per day. Actual capacity was one tenth of this, so as a result the majority of the water meters was not working or was showing consumption too low. The FEGAWS twinning partner Duinwaterleiding from The Hague, the Netherlands, was providing technical support to the workshop, but could not help in the legal complication that water meters were owned by the consumer and had to be returned to the same spot after repair.
A computer system was set up to register the meter readings and produce bills. Efforts were undertaken to localize household meters, so that maintenance, reading and billing could be improved. Which it did.
The number of households that had their own drinking water connection (rather than a public tap) was increasing. New house connections are equipped with new water meters, so the actual water consumption could be billed for at least 10 years to come.
At the same time, however, more and more households were connected to sewers. Very good for public hygiene, but a burden for FEGAWS, if a water meter is not working and the motivation to close taps disappears with the flooding of a house.
Reducing costs
Having no potable ground water, all drinking water in Fayoum must be treated and pumped to the consumers.
The easiest way of cutting costs of electricity is to switch off the pumps. The easiest way to get maximum supply is to keep them running. Neither easy way is good for business. The engineers managing the treatment plants and water pumps were assisted to make sound business decisions on production strategies.
Effectuating such strategies proved difficult. All personnel of FEGAWS are civil servants, meaning that salaries are marginal but careers and pension are rock solid – provided that you make no errors.
To avoid making errors, the best strategy is to avoid making decisions: let the boss decide. Or his boss. Or the boss of the boss. No surprise that FEGAWS top management is drowned in making petty decisions for the lower levels.
A safe decision-making system is required, that provides some benefit to the decision maker.
The benefit part is easy: salaries are so low, that meaningful financial incentives are not expensive. Making such benefits part of the routine FEGAWS procedures, however, turned out to be so complex that it had to be incorporated in phase 4. During phase 3, the incentives were paid from the Dutch budget.
A decision-making system is safe if the decision needed is within a clear range. The decision maker cannot be blamed for making a decision that makes sense. Such a decision-and-incentive system was developed in many departments. Models were made where overall FEGAWS targets were translated into targets for departments, with formulas to calculate the incentive for the department. For instance: saved costs of electricity and alum at given water pressure and quality levels for the production units, would result in a predictable amount of bonuses for the staff.
The arrangements were given an acronym: EMP, for Economic Management Plan. Economic being the ‘E’ in FEGAWS, management being the actual effect of it all.
EMP was successful in phase 3: the operating loss reached zero.
Getting on
The Dutch contributions to FEGAWS helped laying the foundations for a business-like management of a public service. Foundations only: a next phase of support was needed to get it fully incorporated in FEGAWS itself, not relying on Dutch funds or expertise.
