Water performance

Citation

(2005), "Water performance", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 54 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2005.07954caf.004

Water performance

Yorkshire Water, the ninth largest water and sewerage services company in the world, has seen big improvements in its reporting and analysis capabilities through investment in business intelligence software solutions from Hyperion, the business performance management software specialist.

Yorkshire Water provides 1.7m households and 140,000 businesses with water and sewerage services. It manages the collection, treatment and distribution of water, supplying around 1.24 billion litres of drinking water each day. It also collects, treats and disposes of about one billion litres of waste water safely back into the environment every day.

According to Julian Halstead, IT Architecture Manager at Yorkshire Water: “We needed a sophisticated, quick, interactive and user-friendly intranet-based reporting service to allow users across a wide array of departments to gain access to their current and historic financial data that was hitherto locked up in an ICL mainframe. Initial investigations of internal customer requirements showed that our existing reporting system was cumbersome, exceedingly slow, rigid and limited. Previous solutions had been inflexible, difficult to develop, and often couldn’t provide users with the data they needed at the times they needed it. Empowering customers was key to success. By providing a generic reporting capability, we have allowed our users to interactively choose their own views and analysis. We wanted to hand control over to our internal customers so they could gain access themselves to their own data via an ad hoc reporting template”.

Yorkshire Water selected Hyperion Performance Suite 8.2, a powerful business intelligence solution with rich enterprise reporting functionality. Through Hyperion Performance Suite, users can go from viewing a personalized report to a query and analysis environment that allows them to see what is behind the numbers. Graphical, interactive dashboards help employees spot trends early so they can quickly seize opportunities or take corrective action. The modern, distributed architecture scales to thousands of users and simplifies maintenance, end-user administration and content distribution for what Yorkshire Water has concluded is low total cost of ownership.

Says Halstead: “We now have just over 70 users in Regulation, Customer Call Centre, Finance, Water Business Unit and Waste Water Business Unit departments. Internal response to the software has been overwhelmingly favourable. We have benefited hugely from the greatly improved speed of response and working from up-to-date data. The highly flexible nature of the software means that users can determine their own analyses, rather than being forced to use pre-defined queries. Users can now concentrate on analysing their data rather than spending effort in simply getting hold of it. Ease of use should not be underestimated either. We have been able to get people using the software with little or no training”.

Hyperion is the global leader in Business Performance Management software. More than 9,000 customers – including 91 of the Fortune 100 – rely on Hyperion software to translate strategies into plans, monitor execution and provide insight to improve financial and operational performance. A network of more than 600 partners provides the company’s innovative and specialized solutions and services. Hyperion employs approximately 2,500 people in 20 countries and distributors represent Hyperion in an additional 25 countries.