Capgemini helps Scottish Water optimize application performance, reduce costs, and improve time to value

Getting the basics right

Over the last decade and a half, many companies have fallen into the trap of spending huge amounts on new technologies without optimizing existing application landscapes or working out a complete transformational roadmap beforehand. More often than not, this has led to lackluster results as opposed to the realization of an innovative vision. Proper ADM service delivery can make this process far easier by laying the groundwork for a comprehensive digital transformation and significantly reducing application total cost of ownership (TCO), optimizing performance, and aligning technologies to the organization’s business and IT goals.

Scottish Water is one of the largest water services providers in the UK and it was looking to get the most out its own digital transformation journey with a partner who could help optimize its application estate of more than 150 applications. The utility reached out to Capgemini for the provision of infrastructure management services, as well as ongoing maintenance and development of the company’s application estate. This covered core enterprise platforms in Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Azure, Workday, and Esri, along with technologies such as Open Enterprise and Iconics.

Optimizing the application estate in suboptimal times

To make all of this happen for Scottish Water, the delivery team utilized Capgemini’s ADMnext framework to go beyond operational excellence and cost-effectiveness and support higher-level organizational goals such as transformation, innovation, and continuous improvement. The partners applied Capgemini’s Rightshore^® framework to enable the delivery of economically optimized services by blending local and global resources into a unified managed delivery framework. This service is provided through an omni-channel platform and supports multi-speed delivery methods, covering traditional waterfall as well as Agile and hybrid models.

After optimizing operations, Scottish Water was keen to raise the bar further through transformational projects related to digital, automation, and cloud technologies. Two projects in particular represented major transformational efforts that delivered upon this vision.

Project Astro involved the creation of a new digital application to help customers apply for water connections. Previous processes were paper-based, manual, and offered an outdated customer experience, resulting in satisfaction levels as low as 30%. To improve upon this, the team re-designed and digitized all 44 business processes, which covered almost 1,300 requirements across eight core integrations.

The partners created a front-end portal to enable customers to submit, track, and manage their end-to-end connection applications. The portal is underpinned by a back-end CRM platform (MS Dynamics) to track, manage, and report on each case. The solution also includes a new mobile capability, which enables field-based activities such as site inspections to be undertaken via a mobile app and sent back into the system. The project is now under full application management support following its successful implementation.

In addition, the delivery team has also set up a Mobile Apps Factory (MAF) for Scottish Water. This is a Capgemini framework that promotes a model based upon rapid design, development, and delivery. It includes best practices and processes, tooling, and a metrics-based governance model to help institute a formal, structured, and systematic approach to mobile application development.

Throughout the partnership, Capgemini continuously evaluated a wide range of ideas and created business cases for the best of them. Each business case is reviewed and approved by the relevant business area and the team then creates a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) based on the approved ideas. Agile principles are followed, so that the entire cycle from design, prototyping, testing, review, and deployment is completed within twelve to fourteen weeks. A second phase of development is initiated for those ideas in which the business requests specific customizations. Additionally, the Mobile Apps Factory is said to be self-funding in the sense that each executed idea needs to recover its costs within two years. So far, Capgemini has delivered seven business cases, out of which four MVPs have been created. Two have already entered the second phase of development to add requested functionalities to the existing application.

Reducing costs, eliminating manual efforts, and increasing customer satisfaction

These projects have helped Scottish Water reduce costs, decrease manual work, and increase customer satisfaction on several important processes. For instance, the team created an application that helped reduce servicing time for inspection requests made by customers from an average of five days to just four hours. As a result, housing developers were able to complete and submit connection inspections through a mobile application and receive approval the same day.

Overall, Scottish Water has reaped the following benefits from its partnership with Capgemini:

• Projected reduction in total cost of ownership of over 53%
• Reduced open ticket run rate from approximately 300 to 50 and delivered 450 system/application enhancements
• Helped process over 100 NDRs for key applications by establishing Oracle and CRM taskforce
• Reduced servicing time for customer inspection requests from an average of five days to just four hours with the establishment of the Mobile Apps factory
• The inspection pass rate rose from below 50% before the app to 90% after
• Increased customer satisfaction ratings from 70% to 90%
• Delivered proactive monitoring and upgraded execution and automation toolsets with the establishment of Cloud upgrade- as-a-service model.

A glass-half-full future for Scottish Water

After helping Scottish Water realize its digital transformation ambitions with a program of applications performance optimization, cost reduction, and improved time to value, Capgemini is now focusing on working with the organization to implement a host of additional transformational projects. These include automation and machine learning offerings through the service desk over the next three years in the form of automated monitoring and client-contact solutions, along with RPA-based tools for incident prevention and remediation. Additionally, the partners are also aiming to expand customer service operations with more proactive services, such as outbound calling solutions.

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