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HE Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD and CEO of Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA), has inaugurated a forum organised by Dubai Government Excellence Program (DGEP) at Jumeirah Emirates Towers hotel, entitled, ‘Agility between Theory and Practice.’ The opening session discussed a number of topics including: ‘How can the government be flexible and agile?’ ‘What are the challenges facing the government to be flexible and agile?’ and ‘Examples on DEWA’s flexibility and agility.’ The session was moderated by Colonel Dr. Ali Singel, Director of Dubai Police Health Centre. 

Waleed Salman, Executive Vice President of Strategy & Business Development at DEWA, Professor Hadi Al Tijani, Chairman of the Emirates Quality Association, and General Coordinator of the Sheikh Khalifa Excellence Award (SKEA), and Ahmed Kazim, Senior Director of Strategy and Corporate Excellence at Dubai Customs. Dr. Saeed Khalfan Al-Dhaheri, Chairman of Smart World and Dr. Fawaz Hazza Abu Sitta, Chief IT Governance Director at Abu Dhabi Authority for Tourism and Culture participated in the session. Over 300 managers and staff from different government organisations in Dubai attended the forum. “The Dubai Government Excellence Program, which was launched by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE, and Ruler of Dubai, to raise the performance of Dubai Government’s organisations, has been a pioneer in coming up with leading and creative concepts and carrying the noble mission of developing the government sector in Dubai, and establishing its position as a leading advanced global hub for businesses. 

It has contributed to creating an environment that encourages excellence, establishes excellence in performance and work, and enhancing quality of output. It has been one of the most efficient tools that helped in achieving significant progress in the performance of the government sector in Dubai in terms of services and achieving continuous progress,” said Al Tayer. “As part of the vision of His Highness to promote sustainable development and identify the needs of citizens and residents to ensure a brighter, happier future for Dubai, and in line with UAE Vision 2021 and the Dubai Plan 2021, which have set a roadmap incorporating ambitious initiatives and development projects to support economic growth and ensure sustainability of energy and a clean and maintained environment, and the vision of DEWA to become a sustainable innovative world-class utility, we are working to provide the finest government services and achieve the highest satisfaction rates,” added Al Tayer. 

Al Tayer noted that the topic of flexible and agile government is vitally important, as it is extremely relevant to the work of institutions and tackles the challenges and rapid changes they are witnessing. This also involves knowledge management used by decision-makers. It is important that leaders of government institutions identify the aspects of institutional agility and review the situation of their institutions and analyse them in a professional manner. Then they can identify their weaknesses and put the necessary plans in place to make both the government and its institutions flexible. “DEWA, as a government organisation, has contributed to the success story of Dubai and the UAE by upgrading electricity and water services to very high levels. This is reflected in numerous international achievements as far as efficiency and reliability are concerned, such as DEWA increased its installed electricity generation capacity from 1,002MW in 1990 to 9,656MW. 

Today, as for water, DEWA’s current installed capacity is 470 million imperial gallons of desalinated water per day, compared with 66 million imperial gallons of water per day in 1992. DEWA’s electricity peak load is 7,696 MW. The water peak load is 337 million gallons of desalinated water daily. DEWA reduced network losses in its electricity transmission and distribution networks to 3.26%, compared to 6-7% in Europe and the United States. The water losses are 9.1% compared with 15% in North America. DEWA also managed to improve the ratio of production efficiency for electricity and water to 28.36% in 2014, compared with 2006. DEWA is characterised by flexibility in delivering services and getting electricity. The UAE, represented by DEWA, moved from 10th position in 2011, and then # 4th position globally and 1st in the Middle East and North Africa in 2014 and 2015 for getting electricity, according to the World Bank’s Doing Business Report, and we are striving to become the global leader,” added Al Tayer. 

DEWA believes in a set of principles and rules that has reinforced its position as a flexible organisation, such as considering customers as a priority: by meeting their requirements and needs urgently with attention to identifying their expectations, as well as seeking to provide them with excellent service, with a rapid response to their complaints and suggestions. The presence of change management, which works to identify expected or imposed internal or external business environment change requirements, whether economic, political, social or technological.

Adopting innovative solutions through the exchange of ideas over internal and external networks and encouraging external partners to adopt these ideas and exchange creative ideas that influence the flexibility of the institution and more adaptable to changes from customers and advances in technology. Attention to transparency internally towards employees and to external stakeholders, such as customers, partners, suppliers and society. Effective performance management that provides an integrated measurement system for indexes and outputs which we can regularly monitor and benchmark against best practices to drive creativity and innovation, allow continuous improvement, and maintain a high standard of efficiency and reliability. 

Vigilance: employing continuous enterprise risk management to mitigate risk and other issues when planning and preparing strategies and scenarios for the future. Looking ahead: looking to the future actively and continuously. 

Providing databases and information: Taking care of building databases for all requirements, assets and internal and external effects of the organisation. Also, making it accessible to all, especially when making decisions, as well as using smart systems to develop knowledge,” added Al Tayer. 

To identify DEWA’s ability to be flexible and agile, Al Tayer gave a number of examples from DEWA’s successes. “To identify DEWA’s ability to be flexible and agile, here are some figures. DEWA’s estimated assets were valued at 114 billion dirhams in 2014. DEWA has over 10,000 employees and has also investments in seven other companies, as well as over 700,000 customers. This large organisation and the amount of changes surrounding it have pushed us to adopt excellence in our management to ensure institutional agility and flexibility, and I will now give you some examples of this. 

Over the last ten years, DEWA has demonstrated flexibility in lots of initiatives to reduce costs and react quickly to a changing business environment and rapidly adapt to change. DEWA has launched new services and attracted the best talent, and has proved its flexibility in generation, transmission and distribution by harnessing the best technologies, with several procedures, such as the re-engineering of transmission and distribution networks, building state-of-the-art substations, using the best technologies in cable-laying, improving the building of water reservoirs, and using the best components in distribution networks,” said Al Tayer. 

DEWA proved its successful and efficient solutions during the Global Economic Crisis in 2008, through agility and flexibility. DEWA embraced the philosophy of the rationalisation of expenditure, and formed a team to control budget expenditure, while agreeing with partners and manufacturers to study alternatives in its projects, to choose the most appropriate payment. It also works to diversify sources of funding, reduced the expenditure on several stages without affecting the performance, and increased the production capacity at a reasonable cost. 

DEWA’s practices enabled development to continue throughout this period, and maintain growth, customer satisfaction and the efficiency and reliability of its networks. DEWA has focused on scenario planning to deal with future changes and institutionalise risk management and its impact. DEWA is flexible and agile in the way it makes changes in its organisation to match its strategic plan. It reorganised four divisions: Distribution Power, Transmission Power, Information Technology and Water & Civil. It also created a section to support this in their new responsibilities, which contributed to facilitating decision making. DEWA also proved itself on a par with international developments in energy. 

It succeed in getting the best international price for generating electricity from solar energy, at 5.4 cents per kilowatt hour and succeeded in raising generation from the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, the largest single-site project of its kind in the world, to 3,000MW in 2030, based on the Independent Power Producer model. DEWA also proved itself competent in the solar energy projects using photovoltaic technologies with the second phase due to produce 200MW by April 2017. After getting this result, we increased our solar energy targets from 1% to 7% by 2020 and from 5% to 15% by 2030, and raise the capacity of phase three of the Solar Park to 800MW based on the Independent Power Producer model. This is a landmark achievement that will put the UAE at the forefront of renewable and clean energy production in the region,” added Al Tayer. “One example of DEWA’s flexibility is the adoption of sustainability as a key focus area. DEWA has developed a vision and adopted a number of initiatives, such as raising fuel efficiency in the production units to global standards. DEWA has also raised the importance of innovation to 40% for strategic planning, customer satisfaction to 99%, and the e-transformation to 80% by 2016. 

DEWA has completed its electronic and smart transformation, while the electronic adoption rate currently stands at 63%. This has put DEWA in first place among large government organisations in the Dubai Government Excellence Program. Also, DEWA has achieved a 94.3% customer satisfaction, a record high on a global level. DEWA considers it essential to have a working environment that is both creative and innovative. This will help DEWA to be on a par with the latest technological and economic advances, as well as effectively achieve its vision, mission and goals, while creating a corporate culture that encourages creative ideas and continuous improvement. This is why DEWA launched its R&D centre, adopted the Smart Grid project, and developed and Intranet site called MyDEWAideas. 

DEWA also implemented the Creativity Lab to encourage employees to share their ideas for discussion and involve all stakeholders in these suggestions. From 2013 to 2014, in spite of concentrating on the production and supply of electricity and water, DEWA took measures to manage the high demand from customers while ensuring sustainability. DEWA diversified its business portfolio through numerous partnerships, such as Emirates Central Cooling Systems Corporation (EMPOWER), Dubai Carbon Centre of Excellence (DCCE), DUCAB–HV, Mai Dubai, RWE Middle East, Etihad Energy Services Company (ESCO), and Emirates National Grid,” noted Al Tayer. “DEWA has developed a work mechanism to follow-up on the results of the Happiness Index. 

This is a real-time measurement of our customers’ experiences and how we are responding to external factors that influence our customers. DEWA has been monitoring levels of satisfaction with its services on a daily basis. DEWA was the first government organisation to implement the Happiness Index, launched by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai. 

The preliminary results of the Happiness Index have been excellent, and support DEWA’s vision and the ambition of the management and staff. The Happiness Index exceeded 95% in the first few days of its launch,” added Al Tayer. “Meeting the requirements for institutional agility and flexibility has become important in the coming days because it represents one of the most important challenges to our institutions,” concluded Al Tayer.