SA Water Streamlines Effort for Regulatory Proposals
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Pacific
Country
- Australia
Product
- Alfabet IT Planning and Portfolio Management
Tech Stack
- Alfabet
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Cost Savings
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Utilities
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Procurement
Use Cases
- Infrastructure Inspection
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
SA Water is a company owned by the Government of South Australia. The company provides water and water services to more than 1.6 million customers. It employs more than 1,400 people and manages $14 billion in assets. The company's mission is to deliver safe, sustainable, and affordable water services for the community. As a provider of essential services, SA Water is a key enabler of the growth, prosperity, and livability of South Australia. To continue to provide quality services and value to customers far into the future, SA Water has developed detailed strategic plans to address the challenges and opportunities most likely to influence the company over the next quarter-century. Information Services (IS) provides technology services and expertise to all SA Water’s business groups. This also encompasses support for effecting SA Water’s technology capital expenditure plan, which consists of roughly 40 business change and IT asset life-cycle initiatives, as well as the company’s five-year Digital Strategy to address the changing expectations of customers.
The Challenge
SA Water, owned by the Government of South Australia, faced a significant challenge when preparing its first Regulatory Business Proposal (RBP). The company needed to bridge information silos, aggregate knowledge capital dispersed throughout the company, identify and fill information gaps, and leverage it all collectively to create a holistic, multi-year plan. In conjunction with this effort, the Information Services (IS) forward plan of capabilities, initiatives, and business demands had to be broadened from a yearly focused approach into a multi-year strategy to be in line with SA Water’s RBP. The company needed an integrated, flexible planning tool that would increase visibility across SA Water’s business domains, enable tracking of capital expenditure planning activities, and facilitate demand prioritization and scenario analyses.
The Solution
SA Water selected Alfabet for planning and portfolio management because they could use the framework, core functionality, data model, and best practices inherent in the solution with minimal customizations. Implementing demand, portfolio, and architecture management was one of the first projects planned as part of the RBP. To get started quickly, Software AG consulting worked side-by-side with the IS team, providing guidance on the initial configuration, executing roll-out training, and facilitating upgrades. The IS team employs a focused evolutionary development approach, where each evolution realizes a major benefit for SA Water, such as defining the application catalog and capital projects, and enables more in-depth analysis for costs, impact of changes, and so on. Using Alfabet provides IS a great deal more flexibility with analysis and scenario planning; IS can now do multi-year capability planning and see the architecture and application baselines, as well as the status of IT continuity testing.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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