eThekwini Water Services improves efficiencies

eThekwini Water Services

Government utility Organisation supplying 400 000 customers with water and treating of effluent

Integrated Document Management System uses Interwoven for Content Management requirements and eWork to automate Business Processes thus providing a complete solution

Provide integrated Content Management Solution (CMS) for 600 users within a government utility organization

Provide a tool for the automation of over 150 business processes that will improve efficiencies and customer satisfaction in the shortest amount of time

Improve the management of knowledge within the organisation

Electronic user friendly searching facilities allow users to now find information timeously thus improving their daily outputs.

Organisational silo`s are being eliminated by the sharing of knowledge. Integration between the CMS, BPM and other databases is reducing the amount of duplicate data entries. With automating the business processes, ensures the right person works on the right piece of work, at the right time.

eThekwini Water is a governmental service provider of water and treatment of waste water within the eThekwini unicity.

With over 400 000 customers, including the towns of Durban, Amanzimtoti, Umhlanga, Verulam and Hillcrest, eThekwini Water is one of the largest suppliers of water in South Africa.

In order for the organization to meet the growing needs of their customers, eThekwini Water needed to improve their efficiencies and levels of customer satisfaction. Content Management and Business Process Automation were identified as the areas that could show a major impact with regards to these requirements.

eThekwini Water were looking for a user friendly, robust and efficient content management system that integrated seamlessly with a business process automation tool.

A combination of Interwoven and eWork were identified by the eDMS committee (a group of key members for the organization tasked specifically to evaluate the products and find the best one that met the organizations requirements) as the most suitable products and CKB were tasked with implementing, rolling out, user awareness and training for this solution.

Interwoven manages all the content within the organization and has formed the base of our intranet. eWork compliments Interwoven, forming a complete solution, which will move the organization forward in the knowledge management arena" says Vanessa Miller eDMS project manager.

The time it took to supply new water connections to their customers has greatly been reduced. On average it would take up 6 weeks to install a new water connection, with the implementation of eWork to control this process, this has now been cut down to an average of 5 days.

Pollution complaints are now logged by the call center staff onto an eWork form which integrates with the GIS database to allocate the call to the responsible pollution officer. eWork then automatically sends the pollution officer a pager message informing him of the incident so he can respond quicker.

In the first year of implementation one third of the 150 identified processes had been completed resulting in significant return on investment for the organization.