SOLUTIONS Case Studies
Anglian Water
Every five years, the water industry regulator, Ofwat, calls on water and sewerage companies in England and Wales to prepare and submit their Business Plans for Ofwat to evaluate as part of the Price Review process. The Business Plan sets out the company’s business plan and pricing strategy for the next five years. It is imperative that this document is highly detailed, accurate and submitted before the deadline as is required by the company’s licence to supply water. Given the time period it covers, the Business Plan is a large and complex document that requires contributions and input from multiple authors, and considerable man-power and man-hours to research, collate, draft, design and then, ultimately, publish.
Remembering the considerable effort and resource needed to create the last Business Plan using Microsoft Word, Anglian Water insisted on a better, more effective approach for the Price Review 2009 (PR09). The challenge it faced was finding an alternative workflow process that would make the task of creating the Business Plans easier to manage and coordinate and provide the project manager with greater visibility into the project’s progress, while at the same time reducing the time, cost and resource needed to develop and publish the document.
Having assessed competitor offerings, Anglian Water quickly identified the benefits offered by ucreate, from Limehouse Software. As well as satisfying the water company’s publishing requirements, it also offered other advantages that would reduce the complexity of publishing a lengthy document. Automated formatting, pre-designed layout templates, robust version control, and the ability to easily brand the document, were the deciding factors in Anglian Water deploying ucreate.
ucreate - addressing the challenge
Already used by over 300 organisations, ucreate, a web-based collaboration and multi-channel publishing solution, was ideally suited to the production challenges that Anglian faced in creating the Business Plan.
Ucreate allows multiple team members in multiple locations to collaborate in real time on the Business plan and enables the team to publish the entire plan at the touch of a button to multiple formats including PDF, HTML and Adobe InDesign.
Using the Collaborate and Create modules within ucreate, team members can work from other office locations or from home and still have real time communication with colleagues in the office.
The Business Plan itself comprises three main sections - the company strategy, key components and supporting information – creating the Business Plan had previously been a laborious and time-consuming task. The company strategy, for example, is a public-facing high level summary of the document, and is usually around 90-100 pages long. Coupled with this, there are approximately 500-600 pages of content which constitute the key components. In support of these two documents is the supporting information which runs to about 400-500 pages of Word content. All of which makes a vast amount of words and pages to create, manage and publish, with significant formatting required, which previously ran to many, many weeks.
It is not just the volume of work that poses a challenge when producing the Business Plan. Multiple contributors from multiple locations feed into the document. Previously, this caused considerable version control and consistency issues that required significant resource to correct. By way of example, formerly, Anglian had to employ four temporary staff for three months working until the early hours to complete the formatting, in order to meet the strict deadline.
Using ucreate’s style templates negated the need for extra workers and ensured a consistent look and feel throughout the Business Plan. The software positions the content into a predefined template, giving a consistent look and feel to the document whether it is fonts, logos or colours. These are all standardised on demand, so that project manager, Carolyn Cooksey has one less aspect of the project to manage; Carolyn and her team can focus on the more important aspects of content research and creation, rather than formatting.
Managing the process
ucreate makes it far easier to more effectively manage and control the production of complex documents. In this case, Anglian’s Price Review project manager was able split the large document into a series of manageable sections, and then assign those sections out to the various contributors responsible for providing relevant content. The contributors simply log in to a secure internal portal and add their content. With ucreate’s superior version control, Carolyn can log in at any moment and see the most recent version of the document, even if there have been last minute changes. This eliminates any confusion or time wasted on ascertaining which is the most recent version, or spending hours inadvertently working on the ‘old’ version.Results
Anglian Water reports many advantages since using ucreate to develop the Price Review, from cost, resource, consistency and version control perspectives. In terms of ROI, Anglian has achieved exceptional savings (over £80,000) in the process of the Price Review 09. These savings have been made through reduced design and formatting costs associated with the production and publishing of the plan.Before ucreate Anglian Water had to pay for an external designer to make all of their content amends and formatting changes which would have taken up to two days for a simple change and cost hundreds of pounds, Now they can handle all of these changes internally which further reduces costs and prevents delays.
There have been resource savings too. Thanks to the instantaneous formatting and publishing functionality, the team have saved significant amounts of staff time and can now focus more effectively on their core duties of creating accurate content.
By facilitating improved workflow and project management, Anglian Water has enjoyed more end-to-end control over the management of the project, as well as the production of the Business Plan, while the improved workflow and project management has provided Anglian Water with greater visibility throughout the whole Price Review process.