Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water: achieving increased IT service excellence at a significantly reduced cost

Client Business Challenges

Every five years, the UK water sector is challenged by Ofwat, the regulator in England and Wales, to reduce the costs of delivering its services to its customers.
The company’s board set targets for a 20% reduction in Opex costs over a four-year period with a measurable improvement in service excellence for all business functions.
As with other departments within DCWW, the IT department was charged with meeting these objectives.

BearingPoint’s Contribution

We helped DCWW’s IT department to create a compelling roadmap to unify its team around a short- and medium-plan for the future.

• A joint DCWW and BearingPoint team reviewed the IT capability and cost baseline to form the basis of a service-improvement and cost-reduction roadmap
• A two-work-stream approach was developed to capture the current service baseline:
  • Business context for service improvement: gained a detailed understanding of the IT baseline in terms of services and service quality
  • Assessed existing IT capabilities: used the Innovation Value Institute IT Capability Maturity Framework as a guide
• An efficiency and effectiveness audit was undertaken using a suite of BearingPoint analytical techniques to identify where and how cost savings could be delivered across IT

Client Business Outcomes

Within a four-week period, the team created a plan to achieve the 20% cost savings over the four-year target period.
The roadmap provided an effective and highly convincing tool for communicating how service improvements would be delivered while achieving significant savings to business peers and the IT team.
The plan was quickly approved by senior management.