Thames Water: Automating core business processes to improve delivery of life’s essential service
Going with the flow in automation
Thames Water supplies more than seven billion liters of water and wastewater daily in the Thames Valley. The company wanted to automate repetitive processes in retail and finance to increase efficiency, provide value-added work for its staff, and improve customer communications. The SAP Build Process Automation solution helps Thames Water achieve these goals.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Utilities | Reading, United Kingdom | 7,086 employees | Wipro Ltd. |
Head of Technology Architecture, Thames Water Utilities Ltd.
Increasing efficiency and opportunities for value-added work
With a tagline of “providing life’s essential service,” Thames Water Utilities Ltd. provides clean water and wastewater treatment for three and a half million properties and 15 million customers. It’s responsible for an extensive water management infrastructure spanning most of Greater London, the Thames Valley, Surrey, and other parts of the United Kingdom.
The business was using an on-premises robotic process automation tool and a process mining tool from third-party suppliers, but these were challenging to integrate and maintain and required specific expertise. The main difficulty was managing the tool should the developer who wrote the code for it leave the company. Thames Water sought to simplify how it drives enterprise automation, so it wanted to invest in a product that its staff could use without writing any code. In parallel, it made the strategic decision to renovate its automation landscape to bring it to the next level and consolidate its IT landscape with software from its top-tier vendors.
Head of Technology Architecture, Thames Water Utilities Ltd.
Adopting cloud-based software to automate repetitive processes
To reduce complexity and maximize its existing investment, Thames Water decided to standardize its process automation tools on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) as an enterprise automation platform. It therefore adopted SAP Build Process Automation. It valued the high level of innovation and changes in the technology as outlined in a road map published by SAP. The utilities company deployed SAP Build Process Automation in the cloud and integrated it with the SAP ERP application, SAP for Utilities solutions, the SAP Customer Relationship Management application, and third-party software. This combination of software helps it meet its process automation needs.
Wipro, the system integrator, created the first processes and applied them in a single sprint of about one month. And the customer success partner team from SAP made expert resources available for the implementation. The company enjoyed early successes in automating tasks and processes with SAP Build Process Automation. This opened the door for additional automation between systems by using SAP Integration Suite. Thames Water also sought to use the SAP Fiori user experience to simplify interaction with the systems and access to information. So far, 30 robots have been built around 16 processes. All proposals for process automation made by the business are carefully assessed and selected by the digital team based on technical feasibility, return on investment, or a new service offering. SAP Build Process Automation enables the automation of repetitive processes, where employees can adapt task automations and workflow processes within defined boundaries themselves. Staff doesn’t need to involve development experts to adapt code. Tasks such as large-scale letter production have been automated. Thames Water uses the unattended robotics capabilities while communicating with customers through the workflow.
SAP Technology Leader, Thames Water Utilities Ltd.
Improving the working environment and customer communications
Employing SAP Build Process Automation allows Thames Water to automate repetitive tasks and accelerate labor-intensive tasks. For example, the company can now use task automation to send out several thousand letters to customers each week, updating them on their situations. This means customers are better informed and receive faster responses than before. The letters are always to the same standard, with correct data and no typographical errors.
Employees are benefiting from a better working environment, as they no longer spend time on mundane data entry and are freed up for value-adding tasks or reassignments. And there is strong interest by the business in automating additional processes. In addition to time and money savings, there is improved accuracy, since human error is significantly reduced. While employees can adapt the processes without having to write code or touch the system configuration, Thames Water is only allowing changes to be made within defined parameters. This makes it more user friendly for the business-facing developers, widens the pool of employees who can drive process automation, takes a burden off the IT department, and helps maintain good governance.
The other advantage is that it helps to keep the IT core clean. This aligns with the company’s “Simplify” program, where custom processes and process extensions are handled side-by-side with the core systems, allowing it to avail itself of standard SAP product releases and free extra features. This simplifies maintenance and helps ensure easier reuse of automations after the planned migration from SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) to SAP S/4HANA. Also, the ability to adapt certain parameters of bot automations without touching the configuration of the underlying core systems helps secure adherence to governance standards.
Platform Architect, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, Thames Water Utilities Ltd.
Integrating automation into the broader IT architecture
After the positive experience with the robotic process automation capabilities of SAP Build Process Automation, Thames Water is pursuing new projects that also make use of the workflow management capabilities.
“We’d like a model where SAP works on the innovations and we adhere to best practices. There’ll always be a place for customization, but by using technology such as SAP Build Process Automation, we’re getting to a point where we have small smooth upgrades on our systems that run as an engine. Now, we can focus only on business problems and not writing code,” explains John Jacob, SAP technology leader at Thames Water.
The company didn’t adopt SAP Build Process Automation in isolation. In seeking process efficiencies as part of its enterprise automation journey, Thames Water is looking at how the robotic process automation technology might fit into its wider ecosystem and the planned migration from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA. To find opportunities for further automation, and given the smooth integration with SAP BTP, it’s piloting the SAP Signavio Process Insights solution on a group system to mine live data with the standard plug-in and produce metrics. And it’s keeping the SAP Signavio Process Intelligence solution in mind for collaborative process mining.
The vision is to improve business processes by putting them into a process model, mining them, finding inefficiencies, and optimizing the model. Having a training platform where processes can be easily documented and updated to feed off the model – such as the SAP Enable Now solution – avoids the situation where somebody changes the process, training document, or data warehouse. Instead, the tool can read off the SAP Datasphere solution, mine accurate data, and drive efficiencies out of it to produce an automation tool that’s constantly improving processes.
Lastly, Thames Water is also evaluating the merits of generative AI to see how and where it might help best, possibly in cases of data preparation.
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Wipro Ltd. is a leading technology services and consulting company focused on building innovative solutions that address clients’ most complex digital transformation needs. It leverages capabilities in consulting, design, engineering, operations, and emerging technologies to help clients realize their boldest ambitions and build future-ready, sustainable businesses. It has over 245,000 employees in 65 countries.