 Anglian Water is the largest water and wastewater company in England and Wales. Providing services to more than five million domestic and commercial customers in the East of England. Anglian Water are on track to be a frontier company within the water industry. Already respected by their customers for the reliability of service, Anglian Water aim to be the leading company in the area’s of managing growth and the impact of climate change. On the wastewater side of the business “Nutri-Bio” is the final product of sewage treatment otherwise known as Biosolids.
 Terragator About Anglian Water The Business Problem The EIM Solution Feedback About Anglian Water
Anglian Water is the largest water and wastewater company in England and Wales. Providing services to more than five million domestic and commercial customers in the East of England. The numbers associated with Anglian Water are impressive; covering 27,500 square kilometres (18 percent of the total), operating 1,246 water and wastewater treatment works (a quarter of all of those in England and Wales), owning 18 reservoirs including the largest man-made reservoir in Northern Europe, with a Region that includes 1,240 kilometres of coastline, but receiving only 600 mm of annual rainfall means efficiency and leakage control are of paramount importance. On the wastewater side of the business “Nutri-Bio” is the final product of sewage treatment otherwise known as Biosolids. It offers enormous potential to make savings on agronomic inputs, providing valuable quantities of organic material, nitrogen, phosphate, sulphur and magnesium. ‘nutri-bio’ presents a value for money service, including soil sampling, delivery and application, with year round availability saving an estimated £15 million per annum in artificial fertilisers. Anglian Water Biosolids are produced to the highest standards created by the Environment Agency and embodied in Government Legislation. Anglian Water are on track to be a frontier company within the water industry. Already respected by their customers for the reliability of service, Anglian Water aim to be the leading company in the area’s of managing growth and the impact of climate change. The Business Problem Cotton Valley, Milton Keynes Based at Milton Keynes, Biosolids Sales Manager, Alan Thorogood, had struggled for years to both identify and gain corporate support for a suitable technology to modernise his sales and logistics process. His issues included: - To date all processing associated with the sales and supply of Biosolids was either paper or spreadsheet based. This led to a number of problems including extensive travel around the country to share data, single user use, and human error.
- No history of activity is available for the Sales Team and changes to the main corporate IT system were considered to be too expensive, to radical and would take too long to achieve.
- The existing “process” was difficult to police, difficult to enforce and became subject to abuse. Not to blame the team as not all problems were caused intentionally – users were subjected to complex, repetitive tasks which in turn were frustrating.
- The IT function did not have the capacity to deliver for the Biosolids team as this was not a core focus. Brian Lumb in IT did however act as a facilitator and made the eventual outcomes all possible.
- Introduce a greater level of automated communication so that inherent delays in the process are eradicated and the management team are able to pro-actively manage the business instead of having to react constantly.
- By modernising the process this will allow us to extend information within the business and collaborate with our colleagues to provide a platform from which to grow and deliver greater business efficiencies and benefits.
The Easy Information Management Solution Stockpile Brian Lumb of Telemetry introduced Alan Thorogood to Excelpoint and the product, Easy Information Management. The flexibility and ease with which solutions can be configured was evident immediately and Alan and his line management quickly progressed to place an order for a solution for Biosolids. A discrete team from Biosolids was created in order to define, refine, and review their own processes and requirements, and to work in close collaboration with Excelpoint to create a solution. This work was completed over an eight week period with a focus on knowledge transfer to Anglian Water staff taking place. - Excelpoint quickly created a web Browser based solution that was integrated with Active Directory and accessible from all of the Anglian Water sites across the region.
- Particularly impressive was the ease with which EIM could link to external sources of information, including customer web sites, mapping systems, DEFRA’s recommendations and guidelines, Internal Documentation and Standards and data sources from other pre-existing corporate systems.
- The process of selling and supplying Biosolids is tightly controlled and is now enforced by the business rules embodied in EIM. Although this ensures adherence to process, good quality data, accumulating history, and better management visibility, this is not a significant overhead for the team as so much is done automatically that in the past would have been manual effort.
- Automatic stages in the process and automated reminders ensure that work is not committed unless it is both necessary and timely.
- The Financial Analysis now available is extensive and will be the foundation for making further process efficiencies and future strategies for the department. As well as detailed analysis management can now see real time dynamic information at the press of a button, from anywhere.
- Anglian Water immediately recognised the further potential for mobile use of the system while “in the field” – quite literally. Phase 2 of the project started immediately with main aim of mobile working and the secondary aim of extending the use of the system interdepartmentally.
- Now, Greg Taylor, Sales Team Co-Ordinator, is capable of making configuration changes and enhancements and regularly implements changes.
Feedback “I instantly realised the power and flexibility of the EIM tool and was impressed by the working relationship Excelpoint forged with my own team. I hadn’t appreciated that the flexibility I witnessed would provide inspiration for many initiatives that we had previously not considered. This type of technology and flexibility has to be the future for business systems. EIM truly is inspirational.” Alan Thorogood, Biosolids Sales Manager, Anglian Water PLC
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