Powering growth through digital transformation
Our client is a utility infrastructure asset owner and operator, specialising in gas and electricity networks. They have over half a million connections in the UK and are owned by a private equity infrastructure fund with a decades-long perspective on growing the business through both residential and industrial markets.
Amidst some of the most buoyant conditions for housebuilding seen in the past three decades, it has become critical for our client to be able to onboard new assets and customers quickly, with minimal friction. This will drive growth and capitalise on new market opportunities.
However, our client was restricted by completely manual, inefficient paper-based processes and systems that severely hindered rapid scaling. Poor data quality was endemic and ageing systems were not integrated, leading to a great deal of duplicated effort. This was particularly acute within the finance function where there were multiple occasions of the same documentation both in paper form and stored in different systems.
With no online capabilities and all the systems only accessible in at a single office location, our client suffered from huge silos of information and fragmented operations.
Elsewhere these off-line, manual processes led to substantial issues with customer experience. Customers would have to contact different people within the business, without any single, reliable visibility of their account.
As a result, customers would get contradictory responses and no traceability of any contact. This led to high customer attrition and a lack of visibility into the value of any given account.
Our client was also unable to effectively manage high value developers and where they could liaise with new projects, our client regularly overquoted, bidding on an asset based on little more than anecdotal experience and ‘gut feel’ about the customer.
The net result of these issues was far lower than possible profitability, an unacceptably high exposure to risk, and a bloated headcount.
Following their engagement, BML Digital installed a technology figurehead and initiated a complete strategic objectives review. This included both an assessment of the operational model and business functions, as well as a ‘current state’ IT review.
From this BML proposed a change approach with an investment plan that would deliver defined phases of change with incremental improvements.
This plan included the specification of technology solutions, supplier onboarding as well as technology leadership and change coaching with the establishment of a dedicated change team.
BML then tackled these processes to ensure compliance and governance, throughout both supplier and programme management to ensure all possible benefits were realised.
The outcomes from this programme have been:
1
The establishment of a core, foundational cloud native IT capability that enabled uninterrupted business operations during Covid-19 disruptions
2
A reduced need for headcount
3
The implementation of a seamlessly integrated Microsoft-based enterprise applications platform for customer, operations and finance capabilities
4
The complete integration of necessary legacy systems and 3rd party services
5
Better collaboration across the workforce, with faster operations and reporting
6
A substantial improvement in customer service leading to lower attrition
7
Far greater visibility into both finance and operational departments
8
A preparation of the customer for the first wave of digitisation
Most critically, our client is now able to capitalise on an incredibly active market with consistent, standardised business practices that have formed the basis of growth throughout the UK.