Law firm Burges Salmon collaborates with Affinity Water to launch a digital compliance tool

Published by

Peter Davison

Emma Sorrell

A team at Bristol-based law firm Burges Salmon has developed a digital compliance tool in collaboration with utilities firm Affinity Water to support the company’s objective of ensuring compliance across the business.

Affinity Water is a UK supplier of drinking water to 3.8 million people in parts of London, East and Southeast England.

Under the requirements of the various regulators that control the water industry, companies including Affinity Water must demonstrate compliance in a verifiable way.

Needing to illustrate to regulators that effective processes are in place and are being employed, Affinity Water was challenged with improving the task of compliance reporting.

The Burges Salmon Innovation team worked together with Affinity Water to understand the issues, the current approach, and to develop a creative solution designed to support their compliance cycles.

Customisable and capable of being adapted to suit any business, the easy-to-use tool’s key features include:

One-stop-shop: available 24/7, the secure platform provides a centralised home for compliance obligations, ensuring everyone is operating from the same information and can clearly identify their roles and responsibilities.
Task management: automated task allocation, workflows and regular email reminders enables users to work collaboratively, action tasks and assign sub-tasks.
Interactive dashboard: data visualisations offer the ability to monitor and manage compliance, access progress updates and drill down into areas where further action is required.
Intelligent reporting: reporting capabilities means the entire compliance process can be audited, providing a clearer picture of overall compliance.

Emma Sorrell (pictured), innovation manager at Burges Salmon, said: “We’re pleased to have been able to develop this innovative tool with Affinity Water and provide a meaningful solution that supports its business objectives.

"The solution is designed to grow with the client and increasing regulation, enabling constant evolution. We look forward to continuing this collaboration with Affinity.”

Simon Wooderson, head of ethics, compliance & data privacy at Affinity Water, said: “Burges Salmon’s Innovation team definitely had an intuitive understanding of what we were looking for, and they were able to bring solutions to us even before we challenged them to do that.

"There’s been a true collaboration between Affinity Water and Burges Salmon, and their team has responded very well to the challenges we've thrown at them.”

Burges Salmon’s Innovation team is an experienced, multi-disciplinary team that uses its skills and knowledge to identify pain points, create innovative solutions and improve client service delivery. If you would like to find out more about this product or the team in general, please visit the Innovation page on the firm’s website.

Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country. An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts. Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.