Company: Yorkshire Water
Location: Bradford, UK
Industry: Utilities
Products and Services: Collection, treatment and distribution of water
Revenue: £750m (2007)
Employees: 2,200
Website: www.yorkshirewater.com

Challenges and Opportunities

• Replace SAP BW version nearing obsolescence

Objectives

• Establish platform for improving management reporting capability
• Improve reporting engine performance
• Establish knowledge of new software within Reporting and Support Services team
• Deliver technical upgrade with minimal disruption to business users

Bluefin Solutions and Services

Implementation Highlights

• Intelligent, effective, reactive resource management
• Solution implemented in 6 months

Why Bluefin Solutions

• Experience in implementing SAP BW v7
• Compatible culture creating good partnership with Yorkshire Water
• Good track record of knowledge transfer into client teams

Benefits

• Improved reporting system performance with no disruption to business users
• Ability to exploit enhanced functionality
• Internal reporting team skills enhanced through flexible, collaborative knowledge transfer

Yorkshire Water Establishes Platform for Improved Management Reporting with SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence

Since the water industry was privatised in 1989, Yorkshire Water has managed the collection, treatment and distribution of water, supplying around 1.24 billion litres of drinking water each day to its customers in England’s biggest county.  From April 2000, SAP software has supported the company’s finance, HR and supply chain operations. From 2001, this included work management for field operatives too.  When faced with an essential upgrade of management reporting systems, to the latest version of SAP BW, Yorkshire Water engaged Bluefin Solutions for assistance.

Essential Expertise and Advice

Over the years as an SAP customer, Yorkshire Water has developed a self-sufficient Centre of Excellence (CoE) to support the entire systems landscape. Recognised by SAP as a competency centre, the CoE delivers expert implementation assistance across all systems and functional business units. With a focus on financial and work management reporting, the version of SAP BW in use at Yorkshire Water had been deployed for nearly four years and was in need of upgrading to keep in full support with the supplier and to provide a new platform for growth.

With a critical mass of reports in daily use throughout the organisation, the obvious decision was to upgrade to the latest version,

We realised that we were at the leading edge with this project and we would need some specialist support,

Partnering for Excellence

Rightfully proud of the contribution the Yorkshire Water Centre of Excellence makes to the organisation, developing the skills within the Reporting and Support Services team was a key element of the project. With a culture oriented towards partnerships rather than suppliers and customers, the search was on for a partner who could help with the upgrade and, at the same time, transfer enough knowledge to enable the team to support the new version once it went live.

Because we value the skills within the team, we place a lot of emphasis on personal growth,

We felt we could work optimally with Bluefin because of the cultural fit. While we consider price as an important part of the equation, their friendly and open approach, the clear mutual respect and desire to work together was very compelling.

The brief was to work and collaborate with us at every stage, to maximise the knowledge transfer,

In fact, having a Bluefin consultant in the team for about 6 months, focusing on the upgrade as well as willing to contribute to other projects, really helped to advance our own skills - which was exactly what we wanted.

Improved Reporting Downstream

Whilst the objective of the project - to achieve a technical upgrade without any impact to the business – was accomplished, Julia is now keen to take advantage of the new functionality available.

We saw better performance immediately, so our internal customers are getting better service. The other key benefit is establishing a more advanced platform for reporting. We will take advantage of integrated planning and the Visual Composer and, of course, our reporting has a more modern look and feel.

We still need additional expertise and, more importantly, experience of how to exploit the new functionality,

Bluefin’s consultants are very knowledgeable and helpful,

They are collaborative, responsive and flexible. With Bluefin around, we have a virtual team to support us - overall it has been a really good partnership experience.