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'US' Utility Services

Center of Excellence & Job costing improvement for South East Water, Thiess Services and Siemens
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Utility Services is an Australian water management service provider that is composed of three partner organizations: South East Water, Thiess Services and Siemens. They work together to deliver water to 1.3 million people every day. As the organization is a combination of many business entities, gaining high quality data access to calculate job costs can be quite complex and time consuming. This decentralized system prevented the alliance from fully benefiting of existing synergies; they therefore created a center of excellence to gain the necessary competencies to thrive in this venture. Using the Enterprise Process Center® gave them more control on day-to-day activities, a definite perspective on the actual cost of certain jobs and a clearer understanding of each member’s roles and responsibilities. Ultimately, this led to an overall culture shift, as managers took on a sense of process ownership for on-going review and improvement.

Final Results:

With the help of EPC, ‘us’- Utility Services was able to:

Process Mapping in BPMN

Map processes graphically in the easily understood Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN).

End-to-end Process Documentation

Comprehensively document end-to-end processes, capturing critical hand offs between business

View Process Related Documents

View process related documents, resources, assets, and all process touch points.

Responsibility, Accountability & Ownership

Assign responsibility, accountability and ownership at all levels (RACI).

Process Lifecycle Management

Easily manage the entire lifecycle of a process – from documentation, review and approval to communication of change and ongoing feedback.

Compliance & Governance

Maintain transparency for compliance and governance within a complex regulatory.

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cost savings across implicated departments (previously 25%)

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increase in cost recovery for chargeable work

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accuracy in field crew job expense reporting

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operating cost decreased (previously 25%)

The Challenge

The greatest issue faced by US revolved around gaining buy-in from the high, middle and low level management of all three corporations. US also faced significant data issues because of a lack of user adoption of their existing system; the data was nearly always unreliable and incomplete. What’s more, governance constraints within the partner network prevented the finance team from creating accurate reports. This silo effect had to be broken through extensive change management in order to move forward.

Outcomes Achieved

Upon the project’s completion, cost visibility had dramatically improved: management could easily track expenses and evaluate performance against a baseline. Operating expenses decreased by over 60% of what they were before and time spent compiling data was reduced to a minimum, as user adoption of the system dedicated to this had significantly increased. This is mostly due to the fact that employees had a better understanding of what their performance reviews were based off of. This project’s success largely contributed to US being awarded with the Global Excellence in BPM and Workflow award for the Pacific Rim in 2010.

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