Client challenge: Scottish Water wanted to transition to a cloud platform for its customer support and metering services, whilst addressing excessively customised coding and fulfilling regulatory requirements.

Solution: In collaboration with Capgemini, Scottish Water implemented an Oracle Utilities Customer Cloud solution that was future-proofed and aligned with its cloud-first IT strategy.

Benefits:

  • Reduced cost of ownership for the system and all related applications
  • Enhanced customer satisfaction
  • Significantly fewer manual interventions required

Modernising customer care and billing for a digital future

Scottish Water plays a critical role as Scotland’s only water utility provider – entrusted with delivering 1.51 billion litres of clean drinking water daily and managing 1.07 billion litres of wastewater through advanced treatment and resource recovery processes.

Fulfilling its responsibilities effectively has required repeated innovations – culminating in highly customised customer care and billing software and documentation. While this allowed Scottish Water to support a diverse customer base, it presented a serious challenge when adapting to evolving needs in the industry.

Historically, Scottish Water had been running its customer support and metering services on an Oracle Customer Care & Billing (CC&B) on-premises platform, known colloquially as ‘WUB’ (Water Utility Billing). However, due to the growing pressure of the WUB application falling out of support and Scottish Water’s strategy of adopting cloud-first solutions, the utility recognised the need to transition to a modern cloud solution.

After an extensive market scan, Scottish Water chose to deploy Oracle Customer Cloud Services (CCS) within the Oracle Utilities Cloud suite – which offered solutions designed specifically for utility companies, targeting complexities associated with water utility business processes, and focusing on allowing utilities to achieve business and sustainability goals.

Scottish Water recognised that the adoption of CCS would allow them to advance their net-zero objectives by enabling smarter customer engagement, data-driven insights, and helping to drive efficiency programs such as automated communications. It would also ensure proactive engagement with Oracle by joining Oracle’s Continuous Improvement Program, helping Scottish Water remain responsive and compliant with the ever-evolving UK regulatory requirements.

Facing the obsolescence of their heavily customised Oracle CC&B system, Scottish Water needed a partner capable of guiding them through a complex migration to Oracle’s CCS. They chose Capgemini – recognising their ability to deliver a comprehensive and forward-looking solution that addressed both immediate operational challenges and long-term strategic goals.

Driving through a transformation journey

Capgemini identified that Scottish Water’s legacy Oracle CC&B system was advancing beyond its extended support, resulting in a risk to security and negating the ability to adopt the latest features. The partners had already established that Scottish Water was keen to move away from any customisation deployed as part of their original legacy solution and to replace this with standard out-of-the-box cloud functionality. Initial investigations identified undocumented Java code within the Scottish Water production CC&B environment. Together, the partners were able to eliminate this code to ensure it wasn’t required as part of any new Oracle CCS solution.

For other essential customisations considered to be critical to ongoing business operations, Capgemini agreed to shift these from on-premises Software Development Kits (SDKs) to Oracle’s recommended CCS code. This was built using the Groovy programming language, ensuring any development aligned with Scottish Water’s customisation strategy.

To enable the migration of data from Oracle CC&B to Oracle CCS, Capgemini utilised a migration tool provided within Oracle Utilities Cloud SaaS offering. This ensured a seamless transition of data from Scottish Water’s legacy CC&B system to their new CCS environment. This tool was instrumental in facilitating the smooth conversion process, minimising disruptions and ensuring data integrity throughout the migration. In addition, Capgemini facilitated the transition of Scottish Water’s analytics capabilities from on-premises solutions to Oracle Cloud Analytics, enhancing reporting efficiency and scalability.

This was the first European project on the new CC&B cloud platform, positioning Scottish Water as a leader in the industry and a pathfinder with Oracle’s innovative solutions.

Building the foundations for customer-focused innovation and AI ambitions

It has also reduced dependence on customisation, lowering the overall cost of ownership for the system and its related applications.

Alongside this, Groovy scripting deployment delivered a greater degree of flexibility and efficiency to Scottish Water whilst enabling it to adopt a more cost-effective and sustainable operational model.

Combined with a widespread reduction in customised coding, the deployment of Oracle CCS has put Scottish Water in a far stronger position for future transformation. With lower costs, and continued alignment to regulatory requirements, Scottish Water has prepared itself for the future while addressing pressing challenges at the same time.

Going forward, the solution will enable Scottish Water to undertake transformations with greater efficiency and speed – providing them with a strong foundation to adopt forthcoming AI functionality available in the Oracle Utilities AI Cloud roadmap.

This Customer AI capabilities – including customer interaction profiles, credit and collections risk scoring, customer payment profiles, customer consumption profiles, and AI-powered next generation data management – align with Scottish Water’s future ambitions to continue extracting value from their Oracle CCS investment.

Capgemini is committed to helping Scottish Water build on this success, continuing the partnership to further enhance digital innovation and deliver excellent service for communities throughout Scotland.