Anglian Water: Technology Keeps Business Flowing

Having earned itself an enviable reputation in the industry for customer service, Anglian Water is keen not only to maintain these high standards but to push the boundaries on the efficiency and type of service it provides.

With around six million industrial, commercial and domestic customers relying on its water and wastewater services, Anglian Water places quality of customer service at the forefront of its strategy. To that end, Anglian Water tasked CSC to implement a major IT overhaul that would see SAP rolled out across all of its core business processes.

Not only would this bring radical and pioneering improvements to the company’s billing and customer service operations, but would drive greater efficiencies throughout the company.

Best-in-breed new technologies

The ambitious program was tackled in three stages, the first of which involved implementation of SAP for Anglian Water’s back-office functions, including finance, HR, payroll and procurement.

Following the success of this initial stage, roll-out began of the SAP Work and Asset Management Project. Here, the focus shifted to how the company could improve efficiencies within its operations centre and operations processes.

CSC led a partnership with HCL and SAP to implement a range of best-in-breed new technologies based on a core SAP platform. The work has resulted in considerable improvements in the responsiveness of contractors and ease of work scheduling, not to mention significant cost-savings.

One element of the program, SAP Portal, has made a particular impact, enabling contractors to access job information remotely. The final phase of the ambitious program was the SAP Customer Project, the focus of which was on customer call centre processes such as billing, management of account queries, and customer history and reporting.

Anglian Water partnered with CSC to implement a single SAP-based integrated billing and service system, which was the first of its kind in a UK water utility. The transition also marked a radical shift in the way that Anglian Water would run its business. CSC’s major challenge when implementing this project was, therefore, to maintain continuity of key customer processes such as billing. The changeover was seamless and ensured that the customers did not notice the biggest IT project in Anglian Water’s history, which involved the transfer of 50 million records from 14 legacy systems.

Unified, customer-centric view

As well as making good financial sense, replacing the expensive legacy applications with a consolidated SAP system had many further benefits. Since implementation of the new system, Anglian Water has been able to achieve a single, unified customer-centric view across all departments.

For customer service agents, this means being able to view the past history of Anglian’s relationship with each customer, making it easier to provide them with the most timely and accurate response. For a major company such as Anglian Water, which receives more than 2 million customer telephone calls each year, having this level of efficiency and consistency in its call centre operations is paramount.

In partnership with CSC, Anglian Water has implemented a clear IT strategy built around SAP, which successfully addresses the company’s core business goals. The company will now aim to maintain and evolve these services to ensure it remains at the forefront of the industry.

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