Case Study: South East Water uplifts its digital transformation work

South East Water needed a robust solution to help manage its workflow automation and drive efficiencies for better customer outcomes. 

Peter O'Donoghue chief information officer at South East Water provided Digital Nation an overview of its work, detailing how efforts have not only boosted its efficiency but also its community grants program.

“We've had Pega in place now for about three years and South East Water is in the process of rolling out a very large digital program.

“What that does is make our process much more complex, we've got a lot more systems and we use Pega as a glue to manage the workflows between our various systems.”

O'Donoghue said as the government-owned utilities company moves through around seven different systems, AI-decisioning and workflow automation platform, Pega, manages most workflows plus cloud products like Salesforce and Azure. 

South East Water, which manages sewerage and recycled water services to 1.8 million Victorians, selected Pega after a tender process, according to O'Donoghue. 

He said the organisation wanted a solution that was “really robust, but at the same time, we wanted the ability to manage and have a solution which allowed us to manage process improvements”.  

O'Donoghue added South East Water is now working through further automation work.

“Currently we're in the process of automating our new connection process. These are where customers join South East Water with new developments and we'll go out and install a meter. 

“That has been traditionally a paper-based activity- very manual intensive. We're using Pega mobility front end. We do geolocation tagging. We also share that with our third-party supplier.  

“We're about to go live with that and the feedback getting is strong.”

O'Donoghue said another example of its work it’s the rollout of its digital meters to help ease “bill shock”.  

This allows the organisation to identify where there are leakages on the property “and then we use Pega as a workflow engine to deal with our customers.”

He said the system has been set up as an integration between Salesforce and customers using Pega.  

“It's quite complex because we're dealing with landlords, we're dealing with owners, we're dealing with tenants, we're dealing with different flow rates. 

“What we're getting is some really good feedback, both from the customers, but also from a sustainability viewpoint, because we are saving similar amounts of water, which in the past resulted in bill shock. It's a win-win.

Results seen so far include both time and financial cost savings, according to O'Donoghue. 

“The first one is manual savings and in some of our processes, we've actually seen up to 70 percent improvement in the amount of effort required to deliver that and that translates straight back through to dollar savings.”

“The second one is the speed of development.”

He said its community grants program was also able to be digitized under the new platform. 

“The community grants program is a program South East Water runs and aligns very strongly with our proposition around being innovative purpose active care.” 

Grants are given to customers usually from community organisations “anything ranging from sporting clubs, emergency clubs, people providing food relief”. 

“This year we had 160 applications and in the past the way we managed it was very paper-based,” O'Donoghue said.  

“We had a portal which customers went into to enter their application details. But after that, it became a manual process.”

Before “it was probably 30 minutes worth of paperwork for each grant then 20 minutes assessing it” however, under the new system the judging process has become automated 

The sharing of information, plus creating better-connected systems has seen South East Water benefit greatly according to O'Donoghue.

He said the new way of working “allows us to share information from our customer systems into the asset management systems, into finance systems. ‘

“It allows us to push information that our people need at the right time, it allows us to create a better process, much richer processes. 

“It gets rid of The mundane tasks, so people can focus on where the real value is.”