Productivity and sustainability are a constant worry among companies today; these become significant relevant when in less than a year a considerate number of its workers approaches retirement (baby boomer retirement). The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) successfully implemented a business process management and workflow solution to face the challenge of losing 20% of its utility workers in 2009. The changes that the SFPUC carried out across its organizations to overcome this challenge were outlined in the 2009 Technical Exhibition and Conference (WEFTEC) held in Orlando, FL., on October 14th, 2009 where the SFPUC was invited by the Water Environment Federation to share its BPM best practices.

The SFPUC conference entitled "Tackling the Exodus of Knowledge as Utilities' Workforce Exits the Labour Market" underlined the IT tools such as Interfacing Enterprise Process Center® (EPC) that were implemented to ease the impact of having retirees walking out the door in great number in a year. The SFPUC "(used EPC) to capture our mission critical functions utilizing a mapping step-by-step process that will assign role responsibility to tasks and attach documents needed to do quality work. This will provide training for present and future workers and will streamline our process and help us become more operationally efficient," said Catherine Curtis, from Wastewater Enterprise.

With EPC, the SFPUC increased the visibility of tasks and was able to review and improve them by eliminating redundancies. In addition, the SFPUC acquired the ability to standardize processes by implementing them at multiple points across the organization. This establishes efficient process management and set the SFPUC as a benchmark among governmental organizations.

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