Horizon Water Infrastructure is now part of SMS: what this means for water companies

Horizon Water Infrastructure (HWI) is now part of SMS, bringing HWI’s specialist water expertise together with SMS’s capabilities across funding, technology, data, engineering, programme delivery, and long-term operational support. 

The specialist water team and expertise that customers know remain at the heart of the business, now with access to a broader range of capabilities through SMS. For water companies, this means one team can support more of the infrastructure lifecycle – from designing and funding programmes through to mobilisation, delivery, and long-term performance – within one accountable model.

HWI’s water expertise has been combined with SMS’s wider infrastructure capabilities

Over the last three years, HWI has developed specialist expertise in smart water infrastructure, built relationships across the sector, and established a delivery model designed around the needs of water companies. 

 As part of SMS, the HWI team can now draw on SMS’s wider capabilities across funding, technology, data, infrastructure, and large-scale programme delivery.

For customers, that combination creates new opportunities to turn infrastructure strategies into funded, deliverable programmes –with the technology, partners, data, and operational support needed to deliver long-term performance.

The people behind HWI remain at the heart of SMS’s proposition

That team includes Daniel Reilly, Simon Bryant, Richard Channell, and support from Tanya Dady and the Dayworth team, bringing experience across customer relationships, funding and commercial models, programme mobilisation and delivery, smart metering, and network optimisation.

By combining that water-sector experience with SMS’s wider capabilities and resources, our team can support a broader range of customer requirements and take greater responsibility across complex infrastructure programmes. 

SMS can support water programmes from designand funding through to long-term operation

SMS brings together the capabilities needed to design, fund, mobilise, deliver, and operationalise complex water infrastructure programmes.

Those capabilities include:

• Programme strategy and mobilisation
• Funding and commercial models
• Technology and connectivity
• Smart metering and field delivery
• Customer engagement
• Data and network intelligence
• Supply-chain coordination
• Long-term operational support

Water companies can use these capabilities individually or combine them within one integrated programme. Bringing funding, technology, delivery, and operations together under one accountable model reduces fragmentation and creates clearer ownership from programme design through to long-term performance. 

Our Future Water partnership continues under SMS 

HWI’s relationship with the Future Water Association has helped us share practical delivery experience, build connections across the sector, and contribute to the development of smarter water infrastructure.

The partnership established through HWI continues with SMS, maintaining an established platform for working with water companies, technology providers, and other industry specialists.

That continuing partnership reflects SMS’s growing role in the water sector: combining practical programme experience with collaboration and insight from across the water industry.

We are already delivering complex programmes atscale

The SMS Southern Water Alliance provides a clear example ofthese combined capabilities in practice. SMS leads the Alliance with SUEZ and MGroup Water as part of SouthernWater’s five-year programme to replace one million meters.

Within eight months of mobilisation, the Alliance had:

• Installed more than 150,000 live smart water meters
• Reached more than 1,000 installations per day
• Achieved 98% network connectivity
• Enabled Southern Water to operate in Smart Mode

The programme brings together funding, programme leadership, smart metering technology, communications, installation, supply-chain management, data, and long-term operational performance.

For SMS, Southern Water demonstrates the opportunity created by combining HWI’s specialist water expertise with the company’s wider funding, technology, and delivery capabilities.

Our work supports SMS’s sustainability mission

SMS creates smart solutions for a sustainable world. Water and energy face different operational challenges, but both increasingly depend on better data, smarter assets, digital infrastructure, efficient use of resources, innovative funding models, and greater resilience.

SMS brings those capabilities together around the specific needs of water companies – helping customers develop infrastructure that can improve efficiency, strengthen resilience, and deliver value over the long term.

Talk to us about your next water infrastructureprogramme

For organisations that know us through HWI, being part of SMS means the same specialist team and water expertise – now with more capability to turn ambitious infrastructure plans into deliverable, long-term programmes.

Discover how SMS can support your next smart infrastructure programme.

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