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Scottish Water contracts flow into ICT sector

Hi-Tech Scotland reporter | Friday May 09, 2008



Fujitsu Services, one of Europe’s leading IT services companies, has secured a contract with Scottish Water in an 8 year deal worth £28m to supply service desk support and infrastructure services as well as desktop managed services. The project will support over 4,000 employees based all over Scotland including its HQ in Dunfermline and its offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Inverness and Livingston, plus engineers and support staff working remotely.

In 2002, three separate water authorities, East, West and North of Scotland merged to form Scottish Water, the UK’s fourth largest water utility serving around 5 million customers. Each company had its own IT system and support staff, which was obviously not cost effective or easy to manage. Scottish Water pulled this together into one business, but now wants to move its IT function onto the next level by moving to a managed service.

By enlisting Fujitsu to manage its infrastructure (servers and desktops) plus associated service desks for first line support, Scottish Water will save around 20% on its previous IT costs. But more than this, it wants the transition from in-house support to managed services support to help it out perform its targets and competitors. Scottish Water will also have improved hours of IT support, especially for its remote workers, as well as dramatically upgrading the infrastructure that the entire workforce uses.

David Brown, head of IT services at Scottish Water said: “From working with Fujitsu we want this to be a true business partnership to help us achieve all that we want to. Scottish Water has some great aspirations and we believe one of the ways to help us on our way is the provision of our IT through Fujitsu – not only to save on costs but also to free up our resources internally to concentrate on other strategic projects.”
    
Jon Green, Private Sector Sales Director from Fujitsu Services said: “This is an extremely important contract to Fujitsu and one we are extremely proud of winning. To be working with Scottish Water to push its business forward is just the sort of work that we strive to do - both companies are working to the single goal of using IT to gain business advantage. To win an important contract like this reconfirms our presence in and commitment to Scotland.”

Online solution

In other Scottish Water contract news, Atos Origin, an international IT services company, in partnership with Graham Technology, has been awarded a new business transformation contract aimed at dramatically improving its water and sewerage connections service.

This new contract forms part of a four-year framework agreement between Atos Origin and Scottish Water for application development projects and programmes.

This new contract will see Atos Origin design, build and implement a new online IT solution. This will streamline the process that builders and property developers go through when applying for water and sewerage connections to new properties. Once fully implemented, the new online system will provide operational efficiencies and reduce costs for Scottish Water, whilst improving the overall customer experience.

David Brown, Head of IT, Scottish Water, said: “We have selected Atos Origin, in partnership with Graham Technology, due to their proven expertise in implementing large and complex business change and customer-service focused IT programmes. They will provide Scottish Water with the right mix of technical and project management capability and I am confident that, working together, we will achieve our business aspirations.”

Steve Langmead, Vice President – Scotland, Atos Origin, said: “We are delighted to have been selected to work on this important and exciting project. Working in partnership with Graham Technology and utilising ciboodle, we will provide Scottish Water with a best-of-breed solution that will add real value to the company and its customers alike. We are absolutely committed to helping Scottish Water achieve its operational efficiencies and improve its end customer experience.”

www.fujitsu.com/uk
www.atosorigin.com

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