Sam Oosthuizen

Sam leads Decisio’s water and resilience work, helping UK water companies turn complex operational and investment questions into decisions they can stand behind — from source to tap, and across the bioresources value chain.

Sam has been with Business Modelling Applications since 2011, moving from Consultant to Principal Consultant and, since 2020, to Head of Water and Resilience Solutions. Based in Leeds, he is responsible for evolving Decisio’s existing solutions and shaping new ones, for the design and delivery of client projects, and for developing the people around him.

Much of that work has been with UK water utilities. He has been technical lead on strategic leakage models that benchmark a company’s performance against its regulatory targets and test which mitigations — active leakage control, acoustic loggers, automatic meter readers, mains renewal — actually close the gap. He has built detailed unit-cost models tracing the true cost of supply from abstraction through to the final demand point, on the principle that water in a network cannot be uniformly costed: some sources take far more energy and effort to supply from than others, and knowing where changes how a company plans and invests.

In bioresources he designed and delivered the advanced analytics and production planning platforms now used by leading UK water utilities, growing them from a twelve-week operational look-ahead into scenario planning that non-technical users configure for themselves. He has also built asset investment models weighing twenty-five-year strategies against population growth and regulatory trajectories, and a wastewater logistics solution that optimises collection and treatment routing against energy generation, logistical cost and the site best suited to treat the waste.

Sam is an industrial engineer by training, with a B.Eng and a B.Eng (Hons) in Industrial Engineering and an M.Eng in Engineering Technology Management, all from the University of Pretoria. He completed the CMI Level 7 Senior Leadership Programme in 2022, and before joining the business he was an operations analyst at Grundfos.

Areas of focus

• Leakage strategy — benchmarking performance against regulatory targets, and testing where new technologies become a viable tool
• Unit cost and cost to serve — source-to-tap cost visibility across the distribution network
• Bioresources planning — operational and tactical production planning, scenario capability, and asset investment strategy
• Wastewater logistics — routing and scheduling optimised against treatment capability and energy recovery