Case Study: Severn Trent Water achieves real-time monitoring and faster incident response with Heroku

Severn Trent Water Resolves Customer Problems with Access to Real-Time Data

Severn Trent Water, the UK’s second‑largest water company serving millions of homes and businesses, faced the challenge of modernizing aging water and sewer infrastructure while meeting growing customer expectations for faster, real‑time information. Legacy systems, organizational bottlenecks, and ad‑hoc spreadsheets slowed development of mobile and back‑end services, making it difficult and expensive to provision resources and respond quickly to alarms and incidents.

The company built several mobile apps on Heroku—most notably a Real‑Time Alarms app that streams logger data to technicians, replaces slow email notifications with immediate alerts, and uses map‑based network visibility to group and assign related alarms. Heroku’s scalability handled spikes of up to 300% in real‑time data and maintained uptime during deployments, speeding response and resolution, improving field efficiency, and enabling further modernization and proactive fault detection.

Severn Trent Water

John Skelton

CTO, Severn Trent Water