Ingeniero

‘us’ - Utility Services – An Alliance
between South East Water Ltd, Thiess
Services and Siemens, Australia,
Pacific Rim
Nominated by Interfacing Technologies
Corporation, Canada
1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY / ABSTRACT
The 2009 executive team’s strategic review of the ‘us’ – Utility Services IT projects
identified an opportunity to increase the value that its projects were delivering by
taking amore holistic approach. Many of our IT projects, as is likely the case in
many companies, were very focused and delivered value to a single business
group or function but not necessarily across the business. This reality was
amplified in our case because we not only work across departments, but also
across multiple companies within the Program Alliance. The review concluded
that value wouldbe significantly increased by integrating solutions across
functions and business groups through a better understanding of our end-to-end
processes.
In response to these findings, we established an innovative Business Process
Management (BPM) Centre of Excellence1 (CoE) to 1) gain that understanding,
and 2) integrate it into IT projects where appropriate. The CoE has positively
affectedseveral projects since its creation but the farthest reaching of them, and
the focus of this study, is the Job Costing Improvement project. Herein referred to
as Job Costing, the project has delivered reductions in cost and increases in data
quality for financial and operational reporting through improvements across our
core operations and maintenance processes. We expect cost reductions of 25% to“… BPM CoE comprises a group of committed individuals who focus on how the processes of the firm
drive bottom-line profitability and performance. Such a group is usually responsible for supporting a
number of BPM projects across the business, and keeping momentum going across a broad front. They
provide a group of resources that are well versed in the best practices of process improvement.(Miers,
2006) At ‘us’ – Utility Services, this role is taken on by the Business Information Services group.

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50% in some cases and our cost recovery for chargeable works has already
increased by 36%. Furthermore, it has initiated a cultural shift within the
organisation as process owners take responsibility for the continuous
improvement of not only the outputs from their processes, buttheir processes
contribution to the outcome of the entire value stream.

2. OVERVIEW
The 2009 ‘us’ – Utility Services Strategic IT Plan identified several shortcomings
that the introduction of our automated works management system, Montage, has
not been able to address. Operational and financial reporting have remained
manual and labour intensive and certain business groups continue toresist the
use of the standard system.
'us’ - Utility Services is a Program Alliance between South East Water, Thiess
Services and Siemens. The Alliance operates, maintains and improves South East
Water’s water and sewer networks, pump stations and treatment plants which
serve over 1.3 million people in the Melbourne’s South East. Employees from the
three companies operate within the 'us’ –Utility Services organisation structure,
essentially functioning as an independent company except that Thiess Services
and Siemens invoice South East Water monthly for their labour, plant and
material contributions to the Alliance.
Three years ago, we implemented a custom built system called Montage, which
provided electronic control for all works and asset management processes.
Montage is usedto track work, either from public or internal requests, through
planning, dispatching, execution, verification and closing. Preliminary analysis
indicated variations in the way the system was being used by different business
groups. Operational reporting was unreliable and financial reporting was manual
and time consuming.
From the start, we knew our biggest challenge would be to gain...