Hartlepool Water’s Billing System Gets Tenfold Performance Improvement
16th August, 2007
With just 45,000 customers Hartlepool Water, as part of Anglian Water Services Ltd, is one of the UK’s smaller water companies. Despite its size, Hartlepool must still adhere to the same regulated standards and measures as those for all UK water companies, some of whom are amongst the biggest organisations in the UK and over 100 times the size of Hartlepool. This poses some unique management challenges. In essence, Hartlepool has much the same system requirements as any water company because it performs the same public service functions. However, it has a fraction of the resources and budget at its disposal.
Hartlepool needed to find innovative ways of using technology to deliver and maintain an excellent water service in a manner which is affordable, reliable and predictable. Working with Echo Managed Services, the UK water industry specialist in customer process management, Hartlepool has switched its core RapidXtra customer information system (CIS) from an onsite installed application to an upgraded, hosted and fully managed service.
Kevin Ensell, Water Operations Manager for Hartlepool Water, commented “We’ve delivered a step change in system performance by working with Echo and moving to a hosted solution. Activities like annual billing, which may previously have taken us 36 hours to complete, we can do in less than a tenth of the time; month end cash reporting used to take anything up to four and a half hours and we now do it in around four minutes.”
The fully managed, hosted solution enables Hartlepool to invest in its core technology through predictable instalments. Things like upgrades, server maintenance and data management, which would have previously required committing to periodic internal investments, are now all part of the service. In this way Hartlepool is getting faster, more affordable and more reliable software with guaranteed availability and support.
Kevin Ensell explains the benefit of the different financial model “The hosting solution provided by Echo has enabled Hartlepool to focus key internal resources on other areas of our service provision. In addition to a major improvement in performance, we can now also see predictable and manageable costs, enabling us to plan and allocate our technology budget better.”
Having purchased its billing system in 1998, fundamentally Hartlepool was happy with its RapidXtra water CIS. As a scalable system designed specifically for UK water companies, the capability and functionality of RapidXtra is perfectly suited to Hartlepool’s needs. However, nine years on, a move to an innovative hosted solution has reduced risk and released the savings, performance improvements and resilience that Hartlepool now needs.
As one of the most critical elements in Hartlepool’s IT infrastructure, it was essential that the billing and customer care systems be safeguarded in any change to IT architecture. Working with Echo’s billing specialists ensured that Hartlepool’s transition to a hosted RapidXtra solution not only delivered reduced risk and measurable cost, time and resource savings, but also that the whole thing happened without a moment’s disruption to service.
For more information, contact Robert Stait, Head of Marketing and Communications, on 0845 12 12 122 or by email
Echo Managed Services, Green Lane, Walsall, WS2 7PD