While Sydney Water’s digitalisation has been an ongoing journey, the past five years have been critical in transforming its back-office functions to work seamlessly and intelligently.
This business transformation program has only been possible through the continued leveraging of SAP’s product suite, which has helped the organisation introduce industry-leading practices supported by business-data insights.
In adopting a host of SAP solutions including SAP S/4HANA, SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP Analytics Cloud – Sydney Water has shifted towards a customer-centric data model while maintaining the highest standards for property based financial management.
The organisation’s previous mainframe billing system was cumbersome, asset focused, and lacked the capabilities to consolidate its various operational and customer-facing touchpoints. Sydney Water needed something more accessible, intuitive, and robust.
A partnership built on innovation
Sydney Water chose SAP because it thought it would lay a really successful platform that will allow the organisation to grow and improve in the future. The flexibility of SAP’s solutions provides Sydney Water with scalability, ensuring it has the technologies and resources to evolve as a business, integrating seamlessly into Sydney Water’s back-end system, business structure, and everyday processes.
The implementation of the SAP suite to transform finance, supply chain, procurement, and cost-management processes at Sydney Water provides the foundations to drive enterprise-wide process excellence and intelligent decision making. Coupled with the previous implementation of SAP’s CRM & Billing platform, Sydney Water has now deployed generational transformation across the organisation, setting Sydney Water up for the future.
SAP’s platform consolidates all property, billing, and customer-service data onto a single screen – providing a reliable and comprehensive source of truth, control, and oversight. In simplifying the way it handles back-office processes, SAP has helped Sydney Water become more customer-centric, letting the organisation remain focused on infrastructure renewal, water security, and providing premium service to its customer network.
Becoming a data-driven enterprise
Sydney Water staff appreciate the seamless user experience SAP’s platform provides, helping them work efficiently and intelligently with device agnostic support across mobile, laptops, and tablets. This ability to keep its people connected and informed has been crucial during the pandemic and only furthers the organisation’s commitment to operate with greater transparency.
Through Sydney Water’s digital transformation, it has developed a cost model that provides greater granularity and visibility to drive data-informed decision making. Improved visibility also extends to its suppliers and partners who can sign onto the SAP Ariba network and work more collaboratively with the Sydney Water team.
Having a single source of truth has been vital for the organisation as it has been able to reduce 300 manually maintained buyer routes to a single workflow for authorisation. By digitalising the way Sydney Water works – whether internally, with suppliers, or directly with customers – the organisation is becoming a next-generation utility supplier.
Data will continue playing an important role in decision making as SAP’s solutions are saving Sydney Water $7million/year through real-time data insights and operational efficiency gains. To remain competitive in an increasingly complex technology space, businesses need the right people and solutions supporting its growth.
Sydney Water is proud to partner with a pioneer brand in this competitive market, as SAP remains at the forefront of helping businesses run better with technology solutions that optimise processes while delivering convenience to users. With SAP’s support, Sydney Water has brought digital intelligence to the organisation, which means the business can continue innovating and streamlining service delivery.
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