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Case Studies
Water Corporation - IBM Consulting
Modernized design. Maximized care.
Water Corporation implements an eConcessions platform with IBM Consulting
Since water is necessary for human survival, utility provider Water Corporation works tirelessly each day to deliver this critical resource to homes and businesses across Western Australia—more than 1.3 million customer accounts altogether. To support customers who receive a pension or other concession, the business coordinates with local government authorities to provide discounts to holders of various state-issued concession cards.
On average, Water Corporation processes more than 40,000 concession applications each year. The concessions team was finding it difficult to process applications quickly, especially during the peak mid-year period. The application that the business used to collect, manage, and validate these discount requests was developed over a decade ago and relied heavily on time-consuming, manual processes. The outdated technology could not readily scale to accommodate growing workloads and support staff were expending labor and resources to keep the system running.
Further complicating matters, Water Corporation needed the platform to securely store historic concession applications, placing an even greater strain on the existing system’s resources.
Realizing it needed to make a change, Water Corporation turned to IBM Consulting® and its deep technical capabilities for assistance. By working together, the organizations co-created and engineered a new eConcessions database and management platform powered by Salesforce Service Cloud, extending the use of Salesforce as the organization’s strategic customer support platform.
Delivered under an IBM Salesforce consulting services project, the new solution offers streamlined, automated process workflows that seamlessly transition concession applications throughout the initial stages of validation and authorization. The extensive integration capabilities of the born-in-the-cloud Salesforce platform not only make it easy to pair the solution with the client’s existing website, billing and customer communication systems, but also make it possible to transfer data more quickly and securely to external actors—namely, local government authorities for processing.
At the same time, the eConcessions platform provides centralized access to the full collection of historic requests while offering users remote access capabilities.
By working with IBM Consulting to introduce an automated, cloud-based infrastructure, Water Corporation accelerated its validation processes, yielding faster turnaround times for support requests. Concession verification benefitted greatly from automation, in most cases allowing verification to be automated, prior to the Water Corporation users taking manual action.
The integration capabilities offered by the Salesforce-driven solution not only allows data exchanges in near real-time but also avoids the need for manual transcription, meaning fewer human errors are introduced that could delay a given application.
The streamlined workflows also helped Water Corporation boost the efficiency of its concession and conveyancing services team—the staff responsible for overseeing these applications. These employees have expressed less frustration and increased job satisfaction now that all the data they need is available in a single console, rather than scattered across multiple internal and external systems.
Finally, the new Salesforce-based eConcessions platform offers a flexible architecture that can readily scale as more applications are submitted and more historical records are preserved.
A state-owned entity, Water Corporation (link resides outside of ibm.com) provides water, wastewater and drainage services to homes, businesses and farms in a region that spans roughly 2.6 million km2 in Western Australia. The organization operates with an asset base of AUD $37 billion and maintains over 52,000 km of pipeline—enough to wrap around the equator around 1.3 times.
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