Scottish Water Aims to Improve Overall Performance Assessment Scores with ABeam Consulting

London, UK, July 7, 08 – ABeam Consulting announces today that it has been chosen by Scottish Water to help the company introduce a new scheduling system to improve its Overall Performance Assessment scores. ABeam, a global provider of operational consulting services, will help Scottish Water to streamline the way in which its customer service teams respond to customer queries and appointments, as well as to carry out more asset maintenance activities.

The new scheduling system will ensure that appointments are kept and undertaken successfully, as field force staff will be better equipped to get the right people, to the right customer at the right time. The new system will also enable Scottish Water to analyse the operational efficiency of its customer service teams, and to identify weak links and failing assets, leading to improved customer satisfaction.

The current customer data and scheduling processes used by Scottish Water are applied in different ways across its eight regional customer service operations teams. These processes created a number of areas that were not operating at optimum efficiency, with the knock-on effect that some customers have not received the level of service they were hoping for. The solution, which incorporates CRM and asset management software, will be designed to link all of the company’s customer data and scheduling platforms together. This will enable Scottish Water to gain better visibility of the customer journey and the productivity of all staff and resources and to identify where improvements can be made.

According to Allan MacMaster, Field Data Capture Manager, Scottish Water, the new scheduling system will also enable Scottish Water to report back to regulators more efficiently. “As a publicly owned company, Scottish Water is accountable to the Scottish Parliament and the Water Industry Commission for Scotland, whose customer service targets we need to meet.”

He adds: “As a water company we’re feeling the pressure from all angles with regulators demanding more effective capital investment and customers, better prices and service offering. Through our work with ABeam we’re able to squeeze out any unnecessary costs from our operations, while providing better services to our customers.”

David Hughes, Utilities Practice Director, ABeam Consulting, comments: “Improving customer services is high on water companies’ agendas, as they need to be able to align the services they provide with the expectations of their customers. Streamlining the scheduling and despatch process will ensure that during these challenging times Scottish Water meets both the demands of the regulator and the needs of their customers.”

The new scheduling system will go hand-in-hand with mobile working practices, which ABeam helped Scottish Water introduce within its field force earlier this year.

About ABeam Consulting ABeam Consulting provides operational consulting services that create strategic advantage, improve business processes, leverage technology innovation, and enhance organizational performance for leading multinational and domestic companies worldwide. ABeam partners with clients to diagnose and solve their real challenges with solutions that combine industry and operational best practices with technical expertise. Pragmatic approaches ensure that clients gain measurable value more quickly. Headquartered in Tokyo, ABeam’s 3,500 professionals serve clients in 21 countries. For more information, please visit http://www.abeam.com.