Challenge
WaterNSW is a state-owned corporation, which operates the state’s rivers and water supply systems. Overseeing more than 40 dams across the state, WaterNSW supplies two-thirds of water used in NSW and owns and operates the largest surface and groundwater monitoring network in the southern hemisphere alongside other essential water infrastructure.
Formed in 2015, WaterNSW is the result of a merger between State Water, the Sydney Catchment Authority and the Department of Primary Industries. When the three organisations came together, each brought its own IT infrastructure, tools and processes. That included legacy systems, manual processes and multiple data sources.
As one new organisation, WaterNSW needed a single, consolidated, integrated solution to operate corporate functions and asset management.
Ian Robinson, chief information officer of WaterNSW said, “WaterNSW needed to retire a lot of legacy systems and processes and introduce productivity applications across finance, HR and enterprise asset management. We also had to simplify business processes, deliver efficiency across the organisation and provide unified insights into work happening in the business. And, we wanted to move to the cloud to help us maintain an evergreen solution throughout the future life of the system.”
“WaterNSW needed to retire a lot of legacy systems and processes and introduce productivity applications across finance, HR and enterprise asset management. We also had to simplify business processes, deliver efficiency across the organisation and provide unified insights into work happening in the business.”
Ian Robinson Chief Information Officer, WaterNSW
Solution
Partnering with the DXC Practice for Microsoft, WaterNSW deployed a three-part Microsoft platform consisting of Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Office 365. WaterNSW selected Microsoft because it was a modern system that let it leapfrog system upgrades and deliver a whole new cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
“WaterNSW chose DXC as its partner because of the team’s expertise and leadership in Dynamics 365, its exceptional track record of provisioning end-to-end solutions and its skill at providing business process change and system integration. DXC brought strong capabilities for technical implementation and functional consulting, which we needed to link business processes to software configuration. During the project, the DXC team was highly professional, accessible, and disciplined in delivering our outcomes while remaining flexible to our needs,” said Robinson
Outcomes and benefits
The project, or “three clouds strategy”, forms part of WaterNSW’s consolidated information management system (CIMS) program, a single system to simplify business processes and the management of corporate data.
“The new cloud-based solution means our teams can focus on data, governance, and productivity because we trust that Microsoft will maintain the technical currency of the system across security, auditability, and best-of-breed functionality with their continual upgrades,” says Robinson.
The Dynamics 365 project at WaterNSW was the biggest implementation at an Australian state government agency at the time, due to the breadth and scope of the solution. Within weeks of going live in April 2019, WaterNSW experienced transformative change.
Business processes were simplified, introducing new efficiencies to employees. Fast, comprehensive views into data enabled better business decisions. Connectivity across the system allowed workflows to operate more smoothly and quickly.
“Dynamics 365 has secured our customer billing. CIMS is the first stage of our customer experience program to enable faster, easier, and more meaningful access to an online portal where customers can see the status of their account. We’re able to maintain a record of all customer transactions in a single view, which improves accuracy of our billing and customer service speed.
““WaterNSW chose DXC. as its partner because of the team’s expertise and leadership in Dynamics 365, its exceptional track record of provisioning end-to-end solutions and its skill at providing business process change and system integration.”
Ian Robinson Chief Information Officer, WaterNSW
“We’ve also transformed how we capture and store condition data on field assets with Dynamics 365 and the Azure cloud. Through a mobile solution called DamGuard, our field workers can capture information on-site to enable asset analysis with Microsoft Power BI, which helps us project possible future scenarios and risk for that dam,” said Robinson. While improving the customer and employee experience at WaterNSW, Dynamics 365 has created a strong foundation for the organisation to enable ongoing innovation to continue to safeguard and manage one of Australia’s most precious natural resources.
“We’re early in our cloud journey but we’re confident we’ve built a strategic base to grow into the future. The next steps for us include using analytics more to model and predict future areas of opportunity. Microsoft continue to invest in their products so we also foresee a lot of future opportunity in our ability to further optimise how we schedule staff and capture field information,” concludes Robinson.