SES WATER CASE STUDY

ENABLING DETAILED FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING AND EASIER REGULATORY COMPLIANCE

BACKGROUNDAlthough SES Water began life in 1996, as a result of a merger between East Surrey Water and Sutton District Water it can in fact trace its roots back to the mid nineteenth century when Victorian engineers first started connecting houses to the water mains.

SES Water supplies an average of 160 millon litres of water to its customers every day, via 3,500km of pipes and 31 reservoirs and water towers.

The company employs over 280 people and is now under Japanese ownership, having been acquired by Sumitomo Corporation and Osaka Gas in 2013.

THE CHALLENGESES Water, along with the other water companies in the United Kingdom, operates within a regulatory framework, overseen by Ofwat, which places considerable demands on the company’s financial planning and reporting systems. Under Ofwat rules, SES Water must be able to differentiate regulated and non-regulated cost and profit centres and ensure that investment plans – agreed with the regulator over a 5-year cycle – are ring-fenced from other business expenditure.

With up to 300 significant infrastructure projects in progress in any one year, keeping track of all the costs and assets across the business, reporting on them to prove compliance to the regulator, as well as keeping financial stakeholders informed of business performance is a significant challenge.

In 2003, when we first began working with SES Water, the company was in the build-up to the 2004 Price Review which set the company’s reporting and revenue parameters for the next five years.

It had become clear to the company that their existing financial and accounting software was becoming obsolete and was unable to support the accounts team in the way required of it.

Bev Heine, Financial Controller SES Water

In 15 years of working with NAV, I’ve never found anything it can’t do – that’s good enough for me.

SES Water provides an essential service to its customers. It is responsible for supplying over 282,000 homes and businesses across East Surrey, West Sussex, West Kent and South London with clean water.

A STORY OF CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT TVision introduced SES Water to Microsoft Dynamics NAV 3.5 in 2003 to enable the company to enhance its financial information. Using dimensions, NAV can be configured to meet the requirements of all stakeholders including the regulator.

Since that initial integration, we have worked with SES Water to upgrade the system they use. NAV 3.5 eventually came to the end of its supported lifecycle, and more recently Microsoft replaced the “Classic” version that had served NAV to 2009, with the Role Tailored (RT) version from 2009 onwards.

In each case, the upgrades provided SES Water with more powerful and more versatile functionality, making processes simpler and more integrated. Moving from Classic to RT had the potential for significant disruption as two thirds of the company’s staff were familiar with the classic interface, but, with regular structured training sessions delivered alongside the technology project, the learning curve and disruption were kept to a minimum.

Additional challenges during the upgrade process included carrying over a legacy Geographic Information System (GIS) and handheld stock control devices which were integrated with the platform.

This required a rewrite of the interfaces to enable both tools to function properly with the new NAV version, a job made all the more difficult by the ageing software used by the two legacy systems.

BENEFITS DELIVEREDNAV 2013 has provided SES Water with a number of new benefits, including:

• Bespoke timesheet functionality that records working hours in line with industry norms, allowing for time-of-day to be recorded, rather than number of hours, as well as overtime and “standby” rates.

• Document capture through OCR (optical character recognition) enabling dramatically streamlined processing and approval workflows on 1000’s of purchase orders and invoices.

THE FUTUREAs the water industry and its regulatory environment continues to evolve, so SES Water’s financial and reporting requirements are likely to need to adapt. The flexibility of Dynamics NAV will enable the business to respond to those changes, and meet those requirements. And here at TVision we’ll be on hand every step of the way to help our client continue to get the best out of NAV.

TVISION TECHNOLOGY LTD © 2017

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TVision deliver efficiency, control and growth by having one of the most experienced Microsoft NAV teams in the UK. Our experienced Dynamics team will help your business access technical innovation across finance and operations delivering greater operational excellence, easy reporting, agile solutions and better customer experience for your clients.

In addition to deep technical know-how, every member of the team takes real pleasure from implementing solutions that are just the right fit for your business - no matter what industry you are in. That’s why our customers stay with us for the long-term, whether they are implementing a new system, enhancing their existing NAV deployment or looking for an outstanding support partner.

Industry: UtilitiesProcesses: Accounting & Finance / BI & Reporting / Project Accounting Integrations: OCR