If awards are a measure for achievement, then YorkshireWater makes a high grade. It won the Utility of the Year Award three years in a row — 2004 through 2006 — and was nominated for the IT Initiative Award in 2007. YorkshireWater owes a large part of its success to smart deployment and management of technology. For example, nearly £1.5 million ($3 million) has been earmarked for a project that would allow men to work on pipes without stopping the water supply so that potential problems are tackled before they impact the supply.
But the bedrock of a utility company’s technology infrastructure is its billing system that helps optimize revenue and fosters customer goodwill. YorkshireWater’s journey from a legacy billing system to its current one called for smart choices in technology and sourcing.
Legacy Problems
Adopting technology that was advanced for its time was nothing new at YorkshireWater. Even as far back as in 1978, YorkshireWater implemented a COBOL-coded, Intel-based dual-node Trimetra Nova billing system. The company outsourced the application development and maintenance of its billing system to a third party, but kept customer services in-house for a strategic reason. The company believed that having the customer-service executives in the same geography helps them relate to customers’ problems more easily.
“We do not consider Offshoring as a cost incurred. In fact, this is the way in which we drive
innovation into our business.”
Alan Harrison, Director, IT YorkshireWater
Using a shared services model, YorkshireWater’s customer service is handled by Loop Customer Management. Loop handles all payment processing and customer services, using the same billing system as the rest of the company. But the aging billing system was getting painful to handle and costs of shouldering a system that was not amenable to growth was a matter of concern. “We could see an end to that technology coming, so we decided to migrate,” says Alan Harrison, Director, IT, YorkshireWater.
There were many problems associated with the legacy billing system the company was using, such as:
- To keep up with the times, the old system required frequent upgrades and it was taking a lot of time to modify it even for any small change in requirements. It was difficult and sometimes impossible to program new features
- The Graphical User Interface was not user friendly
- New features such as online billing and mobile billing could not be handled using the same system
- It was becoming difficult to find people with COBOL skills, who could work on it both inside the company and at the contact center.
From Re-engineering to Outsourcing
Harrison and his team were faced with the task of conceiving a billing engine that was devoid of all these problems. After a lot of deliberations within the company, in 2001, it was decided that the billing system should be re-engineered to make use of advanced technologies.
YorkshireWater was looking for an easy-to-use technology, as apart from engineers within the company, more than five million consumers and over 600 employees in their contact center would use the application simultaneously. They chose Microsoft’s .NET platform to build the billing engine.
“We wanted to automate things in sync with emerging needs, and also wanted to provide our consumers with as many payment options as they wanted such as online payment, SMS, etc.,” explains Harrison.
In terms of sourcing, it was clear that the best course would be to look at a third-party application development, and preferably one with offshore capabilities, so that the project could be delivered at optimal quality, time and cost. With these requirements in mind and evaluating many other options, Harrison set out for India to scour the country for the right partner. Multiple visits to various cities in India over a period of about six months, gave him enough choices to base his decision on.
An initial engagement with a small provider failed because of inexperience on both the sides. Wise from the learning, involved in selecting the right partner and managing the engagement, Harrison and team continued their quest. The search ended three years ago when YorkshireWater found a partner in Xansa. Xansa is the U.K.-based outsourcing and technology company, specializing in IT processes in finance and HR areas, with a client base across various verticals, including utilities. Xansa decided to split the task between its Bradford, U.K. (10 percent) and Noida, India (90 percent) teams. The uphill task was the design of the new system as there was no documentation available for the existing legacy system. Once the development was done, the project had moved over to a full offshore model in maintenance mode.
The new system went live on Dec. 4th, ’06. YorkshireWater claims that it is the first utility company that uses a billing engine built on the .NET platform. The development team included 50 people from Xansa, with about 30 people from the in-house team at YorkshireWater.
