Practicus delivered a key role in helping Welsh Water with its multi-million pound change programme aimed at providing accurate up-to-date information to its field force and operational centres.
This work includes a major SAP implementation of CRM, MAU, MRS and Work Management as well as an upgrade to ISU. Mobilisation of these initiatives has meant that genuine business efficiencies could be met and higher levels of customer service achieved.
Programme Objective
Welsh Water’s objective was to improve operational effectiveness in the field force by implementing a mobile working solution, providing handheld devices and work scheduling for mobile engineers. This would be supported by the implementation of SAP throughout the business.
Practicus was engaged to provide the skills and experience that Welsh Water did not possess to deliver the processes and technical functionality around the SAP landscape.
The SAP Clean and Waste programme is called SWITCH. This programme has now been running for over a year with the successful delivery of the first two phases. The final cutover, phase 3, will begin shortly and, beyond that, a SAP Billing project using SAP IS-U is under consideration.
Background
Transformation Director Simon Williams approached Practicus looking for leadership for the mobile working solution for engineers – delivering both the business processes that would make it work and the technology that would support it. He was looking for a partner who could manage third parties and internal business and IS stakeholders to deliver the solution.
Practicus’s role quickly grew to delivering major components of the overall programme, including programme management of the SAP solution.
Tools and Techniques employed
A series of tools and techniques were deployed with the client and included:
Planning
- Full technical MPPs in MS Project, High Level Programme Plan and dependency matrix.
- Business Readiness and Change plans.
Scope definition/confirmation
- Full blueprint phase as per SAP best practice was conducted. Beyond that Practicus have implemented a Strategic Design Authority to monitor and manage scope and architectural integrity.
Clarification on programme vision, roadmap, TOM, etc
- Full business change plans incorporating business process walkthroughs, “Day in the Life” scenarios, business benefits realisation in the business cases and active progress on integration with key / legacy systems.
- Full SAP support and vision on system touchpoints / interfaces. Strategic Design Authority holding the keys on the architecture.
Stakeholder engagement
- Weekly Board steering committee and monthly board. Weekly transition meetings with daily touchpoint meetings. Weekly external business assurance meetings to challenge the project, external assurance / audit with SAP and other auditors. All business leads / Directors met with weekly for update on progress and monthly formal Board meetings
Benefits Realisation
- All metrics captured at onset to ensure full benefits realisation on completion
Third party management
- Weekly resource reviews, weekly financial assurance review, separate commercial team feeding into the project, Monthly account manager meetings, quarterly C-Level meetings. Plan review daily and risks / issues / dependencies / conflicts managed weekly / daily as necessary.
Risk management
- Risk log captured and updated in corporate Risk management system and managed daily through the stream.
- Reviewed with business assurance and updated at Board level.
