Water utility combines three centres into one

Scottish Water has completed a £65m four-year IT consolidation project to merge three regional authorities and cut its annual costs by £18m.

The publicly-owned company made the changes to meet a target set by Scottish water regulators of improving efficiency by 40 per cent by 1 April 2006.

David Brown, Scottish Water’s general manager for IT, says the changes to the business have been significant.

‘It has been a huge business transformation project, and IT has been a major underpinner of that. Each of the three regional companies had their own major IT environments,’ he said.

‘So rather than simply bash them together, we implemented every single application with a new process, and replaced the entire infrastructure, including our network.

‘It has made the whole process much more efficient and has saved the business £18m in annual running costs.’

The project, completed on time and £1.2m under budget, started in 2002 and has cut the cost of IT to Scottish Water by 40 per cent.

A major saving has been generated by the organisation’s ability to fix many of its IT problems remotely, says Brown.

‘Because we replaced all the desktops as part of the change programme we have been able to major on the remote control of PCs, which allows us to get over the problems we have with geography,’ he said.

One of the biggest IT changes has been to integrate Scottish Water’s asset management, customer relationship management (CRM) and mobile workforce control systems.

‘We have integrated the processes so that from the first contact through the CRM system right through to getting someone out to see the customer it can be measured,’ said Brown, whose future plans include the creation of new systems to help give the company better telemetry.

‘We now have the infrastructure that can cope with all kinds of changes, including the opening of the business water supply marketplace in 2008,’ he said.

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