Sector: Utility
De Watergroep, the largest drinking water company in the Flanders (1.470 employees and 3 million customers in 175 Flemish communities) successfully increased its end-to-end business integration. Here is the story of how De Watergroep did so, and how Business Consulting helped.
The core business of De Watergroep is the production and distribution of drinking water, the management of drinking water infrastructure and the disposal and treatment of waste water. For large corporates, De Watergroep also offers tailor-made solutions for their full water cycle management.
A while ago, De Watergroep started to feel the need for better business performance and effectiveness. One of the decisions was to redesign business processes and to have them integrated in and supported by one, integrated ERP application that would replace the legacy applications.
With this decision, De Watergroep signed for an important, companywide project, with a lot of changes in many business processes: order-to-cash, service management, billing, asset management, logistics, procure-to-pay and finance.
This project would have an important impact on the organization, with a lot of stakeholders, internal lines of authorities and a lot of change. Business Consulting helped De Watergroep with project management, business process redesign and change implemention.
The project team started by forming small, dedicated expert teams and facilitated workshops to redesign business processes. The expert teams consisted of people from different business units, which guaranteed that processes were assessed and designed in an integrated, ‘end-to-end’ way.
In a next phase the ERP application was intensively tested to make sure that it would support the business processes to the fullest.
The way these tests were done, was unique and new for De Watergroep.
Test teams consisted of people representing all related business departments. Besides standard test scenarios, the teams were asked to design, validate and perform exceptional test scripts related to their specific day-to-day work. The teams were encouraged to take full ownership.
People felt involved in the project and the change that it induced. A nice, extra outcome of the integrated project approach is that decision making processes run easier now. People feel more involved and take more ownership.
The business integration project has been finalized. The partnership between De Watergroep and Business Consulting has moved to other business domains. We now focus on, amongst others, finance and logistic optimization, service management and mobile office.
De Watergroep rolls out a new strategy aiming at a more sustainable water use, innovation and digitization. De Watergroep was assisted by Business Consulting for its transformation. Our specialists guided the strategic exercise and its implementation in the organization.