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Welcome to The Executive Exchange, a premier podcast series for on-the-go senior executives. Each episode features short, impactful podcasts where industry leaders share key insights and experiences from the water industry.
[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange 15-minute podcast, in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark, and my guest today is Criselle Alejandro, president of Balibago Waterworks in the Philippines.
[00:00:19] Piers Clark: Criselle, wonderful to have you with us today.
[00:00:22] Criselle Alejandro: Hi Piers, very happy to be here with you.
[00:00:25] Piers Clark: Now, we last met in Singapore at Singapore International Water Week, where we were part of a session talking about AI in the water sector, and one of the things you shared was what you're doing at Balibago on something called Balibot.
[00:00:40] Piers Clark: And so the topic I want us to delve into today is what is Balibot, what has it done for you, and how does it work, and how will it change the industry to be a little bit better?
[00:00:49] Piers Clark: But before we get to that, let's learn a little bit more about Criselle Alejandro. Tell me about your background. What did you do before you became president of Balibago Waterworks?
[00:01:01] Criselle Alejandro: I have a very unconventional background for a water leader. I grew up wanting to be a fashion designer, but instead of studying fashion design, I decided to take a communications degree. at university. After I graduated, I became a secretariat for the Cabinet Oversight Committee for Internal Security, which was monitoring the terrorist threats in the Philippines and managing counter-terrorism activities. That was in 2002, and terrorism was the global threat.
[00:01:34] Criselle Alejandro: After getting my experience in government for a year and a half, I decided to finally pursue my love for fashion by working for a famous Filipino fashion designer named Braho Laurel for four years.
[00:01:47] Criselle Alejandro: I discovered a love for business operations and that led me to apply for my MBA. I got rejected from the schools that I applied to, but you know that they say that rejection is a redirection. And that's when I decided to work for Balibago Waterworks. I had no background whatsoever in engineering or water utilities, but I joined Balabago Waterworks because I saw an opportunity to expand my skills in business operations.
[00:02:19] Criselle Alejandro: My father, Cristino Panlilio, was the president of the company, and from 1998 to 2008, he had expanded it from a single water utility to 28 franchises.
[00:02:31] Piers Clark: Were you working for your dad?
[00:02:33] Criselle Alejandro: Yes.
[00:02:34] Piers Clark: Oh, that must have been fun.
[00:02:36] Criselle Alejandro: It is. It's a very good experience. Actually, he's very professional. From the start, he already knew that he wanted this to be a professional relationship, and so we act in a professional way.
[00:02:51] Criselle Alejandro: I don't call him Dad at work. We call him by his initials, CLP at work. I don't say "Dad" or "Pops" or my "father".
[00:03:01] Piers Clark: Has anyone ever said, "Well, there's nepotism here. You've been brought in as president working for your dad"?
[00:03:05] Piers Clark: Was that ever an issue?
[00:03:07] Criselle Alejandro: So I was very conscious about that and also having the reputation of COO or child of owner, right?
[00:03:16] Piers Clark: Is that what it was called, COO child of owner?
[00:03:18] Piers Clark: Oh, I love it. That is such a good anagram!
[00:03:21] Criselle Alejandro: We have these conversations about family business before I joined, and he's very conscious of wanting to build a family business. So he already had very clear guidelines of how we would work together as a father-daughter tandem in the company.
[00:03:41] Criselle Alejandro: And on my part, I really made conscious effort to make sure that I didn't have a sense of entitlement. I came in at middle management and I made sure that I followed all the rules just like all employees.
[00:03:58] Criselle Alejandro: But I have to admit, there are times when it gets emotional and also when we have heated arguments it also can sometimes get personal, but we know how to manage, right?
[00:04:12] Piers Clark: Criselle, its wonderful to hear that story. Let's now talk about Balabago Waterworks. Where is it? How many people does it serve?
[00:04:20] Criselle Alejandro: Balabago Waterworks is the fourth-largest private water utility in the country. Its business model is a public-private partnership with municipal local government units, and we develop water supply and distribution systems in small towns with populations of around 10,000, to small cities with populations of 150,000.
[00:04:43] Criselle Alejandro: Today, we operate 93 municipal franchises, with more than 350,000 billed accounts, serving a total of 1.5 million people. We produce a total of 290 million liters per day, and our global NRW is 15%.
[00:05:02] Piers Clark: Wonderful. That's a very good set of statistics. And just geography-wise, are you all across the Philippines, or are you in a particular region of the Philippines?
[00:05:09] Piers Clark: Help someone who wouldn't know the Philippines, where would they find you in the country?
[00:05:14] Criselle Alejandro: We operate from the very north to the very south of the Philippines, across 24 provinces. So we are scattered all over the country.
[00:05:24] Piers Clark: Nice. Now, we met at Singapore International Water Week, talking about AI and talking about Balibot. So tell me, what is Balibot? What was the problem it was trying to solve? Let's start there.
[00:05:36] Criselle Alejandro: Balibot is Balibago Waterworks' digital twin for preventive maintenance and asset management. It began through a pilot test with the company TeamSolve in 2023, who we were introduced to by Imagine H2O. And at that time, our company has not been able to really systematize our preventive maintenance and asset management, so everything is still reactive about emergency repairs and maintenance. So I wanted to shift our company from this reactive stance to a proactive stance.
[00:06:17] Piers Clark: Reactive is so much more expensive than doing things in a proactive way.
[00:06:22] Criselle Alejandro: Yes. And another thing was the AI aspect. And so I wanted to "Leapfrog" the company. We are very manual, paper-based, and I wanted to have this digital transformation.
[00:06:38] Criselle Alejandro: So we had a pilot test for six months. To be honest, in the beginning, when TeamSolve came to us, they had a version of AI digital twin that was using WhatsApp as its platform. So when we were doing the pilot test, it was very chat-based like a chatbot for preventive maintenance .
[00:07:02] Criselle Alejandro: And our operators are speaking the local language, Filipino, and the chats were in English. So in the beginning there was, of course, that language barrier that made it difficult to use. So they developed it into Filipino. So that was a good thing.
[00:07:22] Criselle Alejandro: And then when we were using it already during the pilot test, they decided to upgrade and shift to another platform which they developed themselves, so shift out of WhatsApp and develop their own platform.
So, after the six-month pilot test, they actually went into development for another eight months which we now call the SUV version. So that first version that they came to us with was like a bicycle and then now it's upgraded to an SUV. That's our joke. And so Balibot, now has more features and it's so much more powerful.
[00:08:03] Piers Clark: Well, the key question here is, does it work? Are you seeing the benefits? Have you been able to do proactive maintenance that has reduced both the workload and the cost burden that comes with doing reactive maintenance?
[00:08:17] Criselle Alejandro: It's really still in the early stages, and we still have to clean up our data. So, I can't say exactly that it's already at that level, but we can already see that potential.
[00:08:31] Criselle Alejandro: The initial rollout was with seven sites, and in order to ensure adoption, we created an incentive program where they would get points depending on how they use the program so that they could test out all the different features. And from that point on, from that launch, our plumbers and our pump operators have been using Balibot every day to do critical asset monitoring, leak incident monitoring, and also to report assets that are not functioning.
[00:09:07] Criselle Alejandro: We now have 10 months worth of data and when we log on to Balibot, we can now see the trends that are happening across these seven sites when it comes to our pumps, our generator sets and our water treatment plants. The AI is able to give us information on which assets are working, which assets are not working, which assets need immediate repair. And then the agentic AI gives recommendations. And so from these recommendations, the managers can then take actions on the maintenance activities.
[00:09:47] Piers Clark: And the bit I'm particularly interested to know, and it might be you don't yet have enough data, is whether when you log on in the morning and you look at what the agentic AI is spitting out and telling you where you should send real people to do real activities, is that wildly different to what you would've anticipated?
[00:10:05] Piers Clark: Or is it exactly what the operators would generally have been doing anyway? Where's the value add here? Is it changing behaviors?
[00:10:13] Criselle Alejandro: So, it is definitely more proactive because in the past, it was reactive maintenance. They would only fix something if it broke down, and now we can send our people to go there and fix it before it breaks down. So, that's the behavior change.
[00:10:34] Piers Clark: I hope that means you've now got more uptime, you've got better customer satisfaction.
[00:10:39] Piers Clark: Has it been running long enough to see data providing those benefits?
[00:10:44] Criselle Alejandro: Not yet, but I hope by next year that will be the exciting part, that we already have all of these case studies and stories of bigger successes.
Because some of these things are so small that, you know, you can't say that, "Okay, well, he fixed it so it's not gonna shut down." These are small things that we wouldn't notice in the past, right?
[00:11:07] Piers Clark: Wonderful. So let's go in a slightly different direction. If TeamSolve was talking to another utility now, what advice would you give that utility in terms of how they should engage with TeamSolve, and how to get the most out of their digital twin?
[00:11:22] Criselle Alejandro: Okay, what I have to say about getting into AI is there really is a lot of preparation that you need to do in the beginning.
[00:11:33] Criselle Alejandro: So even ourselves in our journey, it has been two years because in the beginning, the way that we were trying to capture data was giving us messy insights. So we have to go back and reformat all of the forms that we were using so that AI can capture the data more easily.
[00:11:57] Criselle Alejandro: And it's about the way you ask questions, right? So maybe on a manual form, you would ask questions in a certain way because when the humans read it, we would automatically interpret it and get our insights as humans, right? But if you want the AI to do that, there's some kind of systematizing that you need to do. So over time, you also have to train the AI. There is that aspect. It's not automatic.
[00:12:26] Piers Clark: I love the fact that here you are with a very disparate, serving quite small communities. It's not like you're serving Manila, you're serving the smaller towns and cities, yet you've been able to embrace AI and a digital twin that is hopefully going to drive significant change in the business. And I get that you probably need another six, 12 months worth of data to get there.
[00:12:49] Piers Clark: Criselle, we're running out of time, and we always like to finish with a personal question and that is: what do you owe your parents?
[00:12:56] Piers Clark: And of course, this brings us back to the beginning, where one of the things you owe your parents is obviously an introduction into the water sector, but what other things do you owe your parents?
[00:13:07] Criselle Alejandro: Definitely all of my life, right?
[00:13:10] Criselle Alejandro: For my father, he's a visionary, and he taught me how to be a visionary as well. Growing up, he loved to tell us anecdotes, and he loved to tell us stories, and they were always very inspiring and motivating. I definitely have to thank him for being a visionary and being a leader because I really inherited that from him.
[00:13:33] Criselle Alejandro: For my mother, being grounded in her faith, and also her generosity and her charitable side. So from her, I learned to have a strong faith in the Lord, also to be generous in sharing with others.
[00:13:50] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Criselle Alejandro, President of Balibago Waterworks in the Philippines.
[00:14:01] Piers Clark: We've been talking about digital twins and AI, and the Balibot.
[00:14:05] Piers Clark: Thank you to our sponsors, and until next time, keep asking questions, keep sharing, and keep safe.