A watershed transformation with ADMnext

Partnering for success with a seamless client-service provider relationship

During the last decade, IT departments across the Energy and Utilities industry have seen a significant shift in their goals and objectives; from simply “keeping the lights on” to increasingly being required to drive significant operational efficiency and reduce the cost to serve. IT departments are also expected to contribute directly to improving the customer experience, maximizing sustainability, and increasing both agility and innovation.

Delivery on these expectations requires both a change in mindset from the IT Department and service delivery partners. However, in order to make the greatest impact on business goals, service providers need to have a thorough understanding of their overall business objectives, processes, and outcomes. Achieving this level of alignment requires a relentless focus on stakeholder integration, a well-thought-out and executed governance model, and an integrated vendor management plan. A water and water recycling services company was looking for a partner who could help it do just this and aid its quest to provide continuously improved drinking water, collection, and treatment services to its more than 6.3 million customers.

Transforming the annual billing process for big cost savings

Throughout the engagement, the delivery team leveraged Capgemini ADMnext’s transformation and adaptive services to reshape business processes and improve operational efficiency, business outcomes, and the customer experience. One prominent example of this was the annual billing process, whereby all unmetered connections were billed in advance for the next financial year. 

“I’m astounded by your bravery, professionalism, and determination to deliver great service. I couldn’t be happier – I couldn’t be prouder of you.”

Client’s Operational Excellence Manager

This exercise takes place each year and is responsible for generating a quarter of the company’s annual revenue. Before Capgemini began delivering ADM services, the whole exercise took three days and required a forced SAP outage while it was underway. This impacted operations and degraded customer satisfaction due to system unavailability. During this period, field engineers and members of the operations team, who were bound to provide services 24/7, could not access the SAP system for the entire period. The billing contact center would also remain closed while this process was ongoing and impacted customers would be unable to get in touch with the billing contact center for standard queries and requests. 

Over several years, Capgemini leveraged its Continuous Service Improvement (CSI) framework to optimize the process and improve the overall experience of customer operations teams and end customers. The delivery team utilized some of the latest technologies in database and batch processing to optimize and redesign existing solutions and business processes. Throughout the project, business stakeholders were consistently involved in transforming this process. As a result, the partners eliminated the need for any outages and can complete the end-to-end annual billing process within sixteen hours. In addition, the number of bills with exceptions and errors has also been reduced to an almost negligible level. 

During the AMP6 program, the company was extremely focused on numerous measures and internal initiatives to improve customer experience and the efficiency of their operations. From an IT systems perspective, Capgemini supported these initiatives by developing and stabilizing the organization’s new SAP UI5-based CRM system, which revolutionized billing contact centre functions. In conjunction with the company’s initiatives, the changes made to the platform contributed to a reduction in average call handling time by 78 seconds and decreased the number of resources required to service customers. In addition, the training time for new employees was reduced from two weeks to two days. As a result of this revolutionary program and a combination of initiatives between Capgemini and the organization, the company was rated first in customer satisfaction across all water companies in its domestic market for two years consecutively.

Organizational change management with ADMnext 

A recent change in the regulatory framework required the company to split into two entities and separate its Household and Non-household (commercial and industrial) businesses. This was a massive project and Capgemini helped deliver all of the required SAP changes and carried out the migration of Non-household databases to the ERP system of the newly formed company. The project had strict deadlines and very dynamic requirements due to unpredictable changes being carried out in the market operator’s system. 

The delivery team also supported the end-to-end integration of the ERP and IT systems of a newly acquired company into the organization’s SAP environments and other integrated applications. This involved the integration of data related to 45,000 customers and 400,000 financial data entries into the organization’s systems. This immediately enabled these customers to take advantage of services being delivered via the company’s digital platforms, such as the website, mobile apps, and social media channels. 

“The Capgemini team worked tirelessly to make the project a success and they’ve done a tremendous job in very challenging circumstances. I really appreciate all their efforts and I’m so thankful they achieved the migration in time for annual billing and year-end.”

Client’s Head of Metering & Billing 

Innovation, transformation, and resilience in times of crisis 

One of the other key projects that Capgemini delivered included “Transforming the IT Digital Experience” or TiDE. This was a complex project, which involved moving users from Windows7 to Windows10, including Office365 and a variety of laptop, desktop, and remote deployments for the entire business. This was a key program that enabled 3,500 of the company’s employees to collaboratively work from home during the COVID-19 crisis. 

Capgemini also conducted an eAPM analysis of the organization’s application portfolio and delivered an application transformation roadmap. eAPM, one of the integral components of the ADMnext offering, is a tool that visualizes data-driven insights to enable successful application landscape rationalization and transformation. Capgemini’s success in helping the company achieve its business goals is reflected in the close and durable relationship, along with the fact that the existing contract was recently renewed for a period of five years, with an optional extension of another five years built into the contract. 

Overall, some of the key benefits Capgemini delivered to the client include: 

• Major reductions in TCO, with a projection to reduce costs in five years by 49% 
• 8.0+ out of 10 CSAT index rating, which is above the industry average 
• 99.85% availability for core business applications 
• 78 second reduction in average billing call handling 
• Reduced the annual billing time from an average of three days to just 16 hours 
• Brought 45,000 customers from a newly acquired water company onto the ERP platform with immediate access to a range of digital services 
• Industry recognition with several UK Utility awards including “Program and Innovation of the Year” 
• Successful delivery of major digital flagship programs across SAP, Workday, O365, Citrix, Oracle, Azure, and Dynatrace 
• Delivery of an effective skills management program to support robust and resilient services during the COVID-19 crisis with continuous up- and cross-skilling of team members globally. 

A future of flowing opportunities 

After implementing this multifaceted program of cost savings, organizational change management, and innovation and resilience in times of crisis, Capgemini and the company are already working on initiatives to extend SAP S/4HANA implementation across the organization’s eco-system. The partners are also working on key digital initiatives such as improving the digital platform while investigating cutting-edge operational technologies such as smart meters. Additionally, following eAPM analysis, Capgemini will be ramping up application landscape rationalization initiatives in accordance with the roadmap for AMP7, which will look to modernize the company’s IT estate to incorporate offerings from cloud service providers such as Microsoft or Amazon Web Services.

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