Veolia is a French multi-national company whose main activity is providing water, waste, and energy management services, primarily for public authorities. Veolia has over 163,000 employees with operations over 5 continents and annual revenue of over 24 billion Euros. In 2016, the Veolia group supplied 100 million people with drinking water, produced 54 MWh of energy and provided wastewater services to 61 million people. In Latin America, Veolia has an established presence in Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico.

Before implementing Open Smartflex, many Veolia operations in Latin America were running on internally-developed legacy systems. These solutions had served the company well for a long time; however, with changes in technology, market conditions and regulations, it became apparent that these tools were holding Veolia back from the continuous development of its business.

In 2012, Veolia’s Colombian subsidiaries found themselves in the middle of a rapidly changing regulatory landscape, as legislation came into effect mandating a series of changes that impacted customer communication and billing processes. Veolia’s existing software solution was based on a rigidly defined architecture which was inhibiting it from responding quickly to the changing market conditions; furthermore, the solution consisted of independent systems with very little cohesion or unified control. In addition to these problems, the company did not have a modern system for managing field work, so many processes such as work scheduling were still being done manually.

To face its pressing business challenges, Veolia began to seek a technological renovation which would improve efficiency and allow it to adapt quickly to the new regulations.

After a long and intensive process of evaluating software packages in the market, including SAP and Oracle, Veolia Group selected Open Smartflex. The solution’s flexibility, consolidated architecture and user-friendly implementation process made it the perfect choice to meet the company’s goal of enacting swift and company-wide change. In addition to managing core business processes and enabling quick compliance with regulations, the solution helped to streamline the company’s field operations through Open Smartflex Field Service. The Open Smartflex package allowed Veolia to standardize its different business processes across multiple subsidiaries, fully integrating customer service, billing, payments, and field service.

Veolia has also leveraged Open’s robust and well-established knowledge transfer methodology to become self-sufficient in deploying new rollouts of the Smartflex platform. As a result, Veolia has been able to implement 5 new projects, in two countries, with its own resources. This has not only represented enormous cost savings to Veolia but also allowed the company to execute its business strategy with speed and agility.

After a successful multi-company implementation, Veolia enjoyed a wide array of benefits including:

• Quick compliance with new regulations.
• Improved debt management capabilities, with an average of $ 5.5 million USD of debt financing plans per month.
• Better process control and standardization across multiple companies.
• Moving from offline meters (synchronized nightly) to online meters.
• Enhanced field operations through a truly mobile workforce capable of managing all service orders via mobile devices.
• Increased customer satisfaction due to reliable online information supporting key customer interactions.
• Improved efficiency for work scheduling and a new online platform for recording field work.
• Average service installation time reduced by 42%.
• Better-informed management with complete visibility over both operational and business performance through real-time online indicators and dynamic dashboards.