Yorkshire Water has awarded Samotics a £5.4 million contract for an integrated electrical signature analysis platform and managed predictive maintenance service covering motor-driven assets. The three-year contract is due to run from 30 June 2027 to 30 June 2030, extending a condition monitoring relationship that has already moved from initial deployment into one of the larger electrical signature analysis programmes in the UK water sector.
The specification combines continuous monitoring with expert review rather than treating analytics as a stand-alone software feed. Yorkshire Water requires findings to be reviewed and validated by qualified condition monitoring specialists before notification, with the managed service providing recommended corrective actions, performance reporting, ongoing technical support, and 24-hour coverage. The platform must also integrate with utility systems including SCADA, telemetry, SAP, and GIS, as well as interpret data from devices and sensors already deployed across the network.
Electrical signature analysis, or ESA, monitors the electrical behaviour of motor-driven equipment by analysing current and voltage signals. Samotics’ SAM4 system captures those signals remotely from motor control cabinets and uses analytical models to identify deviations associated with developing faults. The approach is particularly useful for submerged pumps and other assets where conventional vibration sensors are difficult or impractical to install directly on the equipment.
The new award builds on a partnership that began in 2022 with an earlier £10 million framework for ESA monitoring. By late June 2026, Samotics said the programme covered around 2,500 Yorkshire Water assets, with a further 1,200 wastewater pumping station assets and 300 clean water smart pumping assets scheduled to be added over the following 18 months. Completion of that expansion would take the monitored estate beyond 4,000 assets, spanning submerged sewage pumps, screw pumps, and clean water pumping equipment.
The value of the system depends less on collecting another stream of plant data than on deciding which alerts deserve maintenance action. Motor current and voltage can reveal mechanical and process abnormalities, but a utility operating thousands of dispersed assets cannot send teams to investigate every deviation. The requirement for human validation before escalation is therefore an operational part of the contract, intended to convert analytical findings into work that can be prioritised, planned, and connected with existing maintenance processes.
Yorkshire Water has already linked predictive monitoring to pollution reduction and reliability work. Its wider ‘predict to protect’ programme uses data from thousands of assets to identify developing problems earlier, while the company has reported lower reactive site visits and prevented pollution incidents across its monitoring programmes. Samotics separately said its system had detected hundreds of developing faults on Yorkshire Water assets by June, although those performance figures remain vendor-reported rather than independent measures of the new contract.
The procurement is more revealing than another pilot announcement because Yorkshire Water is specifying a commercially available managed service with defined integration, support, validation, and performance requirements. The tender states that the platform must already have demonstrated successful outcomes with other water companies and must not be awaiting first deployment or initial operating results. That sets a higher threshold than the experimental language commonly attached to industrial AI projects.
The contract sits inside AMP8, the 2025-30 regulatory investment period for the English and Welsh water sector. Yorkshire Water has an £8.3 billion investment programme for the period and is expanding monitoring across both clean water and wastewater infrastructure. Asset intelligence is being asked to support reliability, pollution reduction, energy efficiency, and better targeting of maintenance expenditure, so value depends on whether information changes intervention decisions before failure rather than merely documenting asset condition more precisely.
Integration requirements will determine how much of that value reaches day-to-day operations. SCADA and telemetry provide operating context, while SAP and GIS connect asset condition with work management and location data. Bringing those systems together allows a developing electrical signature to become a maintenance event with an asset identity, operating history, and response route rather than an isolated alarm. The contract also requires interoperability with existing devices and sensors, reducing the risk of another closed monitoring layer alongside systems already in service.
The new agreement starts in 2027, leaving time for the current rollout to establish a larger installed base before the next managed service period begins. By then, Yorkshire Water’s predictive maintenance programme will have moved through pilot, scale-up, integration, and renewal stages. That progression is a more demanding test than proving that an algorithm can detect a fault. The technology now has to remain useful across thousands of ageing assets while feeding decisions made by control-room, engineering, and maintenance teams every day.
