Explore Farys’s journey with SAP
Ready to modernize its IT landscape to harness efficiencies and enable innovation, multi-utility Farys ov invested in SAP S/4HANA deployed in a cloud environment. It then built a smart water platform, taking advantage of the SAP Cloud for Energy solution and SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Utilities | Ghent, Belgium | 950 employees | Capgemini SE |
increase in in-house leak detection, from a yearly to a daily cadence.
lead time for annual invoice generation, down from weeks.
cost reduction potential, thanks to more efficient processes.
CIO, Farys ov
Establishing a long-term strategy for continuous business innovation
Beginning more than 100 years ago as a water transportation operator between Brussels, Belgium, and cities across Flanders, Farys ov now offers a wide range of services to municipalities in the region. These include the production and distribution of drinking water; water safety monitoring; wastewater transportation and management; and the facilitation and management of more than 100 swimming pools and sport facilities. Over the past 10 years, Farys has also diversified, providing other services to public and semipublic entities. For example, the company now procures hospital beds for nursing homes and healthcare providers, making approximately 52,000 purchases each year.
Always a front-runner and role model in IT innovation, Farys has a history of using advanced technology to drive efficient, effective, and socially responsible operations that save costs while improving customer service and experiences. The organization also collaborates with other utility companies including water, energy, and telecommunications providers to develop these innovations.
Empowered by this long-term strategy of business innovation, Farys is constantly evolving its IT landscape. To ready its operations for the future and enable the use of intelligent technologies, Farys opted to move its ERP system to the cloud and extend it with new capabilities and industry-specific cloud solutions.
With the new systems in place, Farys then envisioned building a cloud-based smart meter and energy management solution known as its smart water platform to support a mass rollout of smart water meters. These would enable data-driven use cases that help the company manage sustainability challenges and high operating costs from soaring nonrevenue water, unreliable supply, low groundwater-level flows, and a legislative push to smart meters.
Enabling real-time data-driven processes through event-driven architecture
Farys has successfully relied on SAP solutions for nearly two decades. Likewise, it considers Capgemini SE its trusted implementation partner. So, when the time came to upgrade the SAP ERP application and extend it with intelligent, industry-specific cloud solutions, it turned to SAP and Capgemini again. Capgemini helped Farys configure SAP S/4HANA in a cloud environment based on Amazon Web Services and deploy SAP BTP and the SAP Cloud for Energy solution. Capgemini also assisted in the development of the smart water platform in close partnership with SAP.
With SAP S/4HANA, Farys can support its existing landscape and suite of SAP solutions while enhancing usability with the SAP Fiori user experience. With SAP Build solutions, Farys can also create new applications and extend existing ones in the cloud. One example is a self-service portal for utility customers that’s integrated with back-end financial and customer data and compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation.
With its modernized core systems as a foundation, Farys then collaborated with two other Belgian water companies to build a sector-wide smart water platform. The platform takes advantage of SAP Cloud for Energy and SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh. The advanced event mesh is a key component in transforming the company’s smart water capabilities from annual readings to daily actions. It delivers real-time visibility to over two million smart meter readings per day, sharing these events in real time across multiple applications for further handling and data analysis. This encompasses billing in the SAP S/4HANA Utilities solution and triggering actions based on alarms in apps. This is just one example where SAP Integration Suite enables integration among various technologies responsible for sourcing data into the smart water platform. This platform also leverages SAP HANA Cloud and its AI and machine learning capabilities. In addition, the SAP Datasphere solution allows the company to implement a business data fabric architecture and, together with the SAP Analytics Cloud solution, delivers self-service analytics features allowing more users to access authoritative data. The solution is also meter independent and supports integration with external systems and data providers.
The diagram below illustrates the technology architecture that drives the smart water platform at Farys.
Achieving optimal and more sustainable operations and a better customer experience
Today, Farys is running nearly all its services, including drinking water management, sewage management, infrastructure management, procurement, and more, on SAP S/4HANA, delivering significant improvements in efficiency and insight enterprise-wide.
Real-time reporting eliminates overnight runs and allows teams to make business decisions in the moment. Among other things, this has led to faster sales calculations, greater warehouse visibility, and preventive asset maintenance – saving Farys and its employees time and money. Mobile-enabled SAP Fiori apps are also streamlining processes for employees and external partners by providing a better, more standardized user experience.
With back-end data from SAP S/4HANA linked to geographic information system data, field service teams have the information they need right at their fingertips. The introduction of a customer portal has also proven to be a major cost and time saver. By providing customers with self-service access, Farys is now spending far less on contact center operations while offering greater convenience and enjoying higher customer satisfaction.
And with the smart water platform, billing is more accurate and customers have near-real-time insight into their consumption, helping them save money and use water more wisely. Lastly, early warnings of potential leaks and bursts trigger communication and maintenance activities that result in less water waste and water pollution.
CIO, Farys ov
Driving continuous innovation by enhancing the smart water platform
Farys has many plans to enhance its smart water platform, one of which involves extending it with the SAP Asset Performance Management application. By correlating smart meter data with data from other sources such as supervisory control, data acquisition systems, and stand-alone sensors in the field, Farys can further enhance its offerings with consumption and event monitoring services.
And several AI use cases are being implemented to retrieve further insights from the accumulated data, including clustering based on water usage patterns, forecasting water consumption, and implementing predictive maintenance strategies.
Farys also plans to improve the availability of supply using enhanced water-flow registers that provide supply and demand insights regarding the water distribution grid. With smart meter consumption values from SAP Cloud for Energy, the goal is to inform make-or-buy decisions as well as detect leaks.
Want to know more about Farys?
2024 SAP Innovation Award winner: Smart Water Platform – Innovation and IT Agility with SAP BTP (SAP Innovation Awards 2024 Entry Pitch Deck)
Featured partner
An SAP strategic service partner, Capgemini SE is a leader in partnering with companies around the world to transform and manage their business by harnessing the power of technology. Supporting an overarching vision, Capgemini led the implementation of SAP S/4HANA at Farys and developed the smart water platform in close partnership with SAP.