Capgemini replaced a critical legacy platform with a single, trusted asset platform – enabling faster decisions, better maintenance and £14 million in short-term financial benefits, with potential benefits of £150+ million over 10 years.

Client challenge: Scottish Water needed to replace a highly customised, ageing enterprise asset management software platform that constrained operational teams, created data gaps and limited the organisation’s ability to modernise asset management.
 
Solution: Capgemini acted as programme partner to deliver a business‑led transformation, replacing Ellipse with IBM Maximo and delivering the accompanying change management that enabled a modern, integrated, enterprise‑wide asset management capability.

Benefits:

  • Smarter maintenance planning, with reduced wasted site visits
  • Reduced technical complexity through integration and process rationalisation
  • Clearer, more reliable asset data for better day‑to‑day decisions
  • Strong organisational readiness, supporting adoption across thousands of users
  • £14m of forecast direct financial benefits over the Strategic Review of Charges 2027 (SR27) in the short-term, with enablement of further benefits expected through SR27

Capgemini helped Scottish Water modernise its enterprise asset management platform, providing a single, trusted view of asset data that is transforming how maintenance is planned, decisions are made, and value is delivered at scale. The programme has already unlocked £14 million in forecasted benefits while laying the foundations for long‑term innovation and improved performance across the organisation.

Setting out on an asset management mission

Every day, Scottish Water delivers 1.3 billion litres of drinking water to millions of households and businesses across Scotland while safely treating and returning wastewater to the environment. Supporting this vital service is a vast and complex asset base, spanning thousands of systems and hundreds of thousands of individual assets, from pipes and pumping stations to treatment works.

At the heart of Scottish Water’s operations sat Ellipse, a legacy enterprise asset management system that had become the most critical and heavily integrated application in the organisation’s digital estate. Over time, extensive customisation and numerous integrations with platforms such as finance, HR, and customer systems increased complexity, slowed delivery, and made change increasingly difficult. These integrations used legacy on-premise technology, built by numerous projects and teams over time, that had become difficult to adapt and utilise.

Recognising that a like‑for-like system replacement wouldn’t deliver the outcomes required, Scottish Water embarked on a four‑year, £50 million programme to deliver a business-led transformation. By doing so, the company intended to both modernise technology and change how assets were managed, teams worked, and future value could be unlocked.

Central to this vision was the implementation of IBM Maximo, providing a modern, scalable foundation to support Scottish Water’s long‑term goal of becoming a world‑class asset management organisation. This new package needed to be fully integrated with Scottish Water’s other systems, including Finance, Field Service and CRM.

Capgemini was appointed as programme partner to help turn this ambition into reality, working alongside Scottish Water and specialist implementation partners to deliver change at an unprecedented scale. Together, the partners used Microsoft Azure Integration Services to redesign and deliver the new integrations.

A unified approach to end-to-end delivery

As programme partner across the end-to-end delivery, Capgemini took responsibility for programme management, integrations, testing, business change, and communications. Capgemini provided the connective layer that brought together Scottish Water, third-party vendors and technical delivery teams from our Cloud & Custom Applications practice into a single, coordinated programme.

Delivery aligned with Scottish Water’s established governance and delivery framework, following a PRINCE2-driven model that included structured design, build, and implementation phases. This was complemented by an agile‑hybrid approach, which enabled flexibility while maintaining tight control over financial approvals and programme risk.

Because Ellipse had become the central repository for asset data and was tightly coupled to a wide ecosystem of systems and bespoke applications, Capgemini rationalised integrations from more than 120 down to approximately 56. This significantly reduced technical debt and created a more streamlined, future-ready architecture using Microsoft Azure Integration technology. In parallel, the project team simplified around 300 end‑to-end business processes across 18 line‑of‑business systems down to roughly 160, improving consistency and efficiency.

Collaboration was fundamental to success. Regular in‑person leadership sessions in Glasgow, daily connects, and hands‑on design workshops enabled faster decision‑making and built strong relationships across organisations. The partners also led an extensive change and communications programme, supporting readiness for nearly 3,500 people impacted across Scottish Water.

Delivering results from first wave to the “big bang” weekend

To mitigate risk, the programme adopted a phased cutover strategy. A limited “wave one” release in April 2025 enabled a small group of users to operate Maximo on a subset of assets, validating the solution ahead of full deployment. This was followed by three to four full rehearsals of the go‑live weekend, involving both the programme team and wider business operations.

In November 2025, Scottish Water successfully completed a single‑weekend, “big bang” deployment of IBM Maximo across its entire estate, alongside the system integration processes deployed in Microsoft Azure. Despite the scale and criticality of the system, the transition was completed with no major issues, reflecting the depth of preparation, collaboration, and organisational readiness achieved.

Today, Scottish Water operates a modern enterprise asset management platform that provides a single, trusted view of asset data, supports faster and more effective maintenance planning, and enables better‑informed decision‑making. In addition, engineers and operational teams now have improved tools and clearer processes, helping to reduce wasted effort and focus time on value‑adding activity.

The programme has already uncovered £14 million of forecasted financial benefits, with further potential benefits of more than £150 million expected over 10 years as the platform is fully embedded and enhanced. Crucially, the transformation has laid the foundations for continued innovation in SR27, positioning Scottish Water to further mature its asset management capabilities and progress towards its ambition of becoming a world‑class water company.

“Implementing Maximo was Scottish Water’s largest digital project to date, and a huge step forward for the organisation in its asset management journey. It has not only realised considerable benefits to our organisation already, but it has laid strong foundations for us to continue to evolve our asset management capabilities into the future. Capgemini’s methodological approach to design, testing and implementation, their expertise supporting business change and operating model design, and their collaborative way of working across a complex, multi-partner environment were instrumental to the success of this project.”

John Wigham, Senior Responsible Officer, Scottish Water

“This is one of our most critical systems for asset management and customer service across Scottish Water, so a lot has been riding on this project. The outcome is a secure standardised platform that will assure business continuity now and provide the foundation for service improvement and efficiency in the future.”

Alex Plant, CEO, Scottish Water