The client is a multi-million-dollar French transnational company overseeing water, waste, and energy management services. Its UK-based entity struggled to hit revenue benchmarks, operating with paper trails that created administrative overload and had different departments dealing with different municipal councils, leading to high time and effort to turnaround deliverables. This left the client with little to no room for business transformation and product innovation.
The client was looking for a digital transformation partner to help it overhaul its processes, bring higher visibility to operations, streamline departments and internal workloads, and create digital products, such as a mobile application and web portals, which appealed to its end customers. Specifically, it needed targeted intervention to improve customer reach and time-to-market and create a data-driven culture stemming from a single window view of daily operations.
Persistent was already engaged in smaller projects for the client and impressed with our service delivery excellence and our digital engineering mindset, the client commissioned us to co-drive a front-to-back digital transformation.
Persistent Unleashes Efficiencies with a Digital-First Front-To-Back Operating Model
A team of business transformation experts from Persistent collaborated with the client’s business unit heads to understand the pain points and identify areas of opportunity to build on. We conducted working sessions with the client’s teams to map business processes with digital workflows to create a seamless user experience, reduce turnaround times, and bring operational efficiencies.
We proposed a front-to-back digital transformation roadmap that was a marked shift from paper trails. At the backend, we engineered an application stack hosted on Amazon Web Services to build interoperability with internal and external systems to streamline activities such as invoice generation, accounts payable, and report generation. Powering these applications was a unified data platform that sourced relevant data from internal systems and validated and verified the data to create a single source of truth from which the client’s teams could glean actionable insights. We consolidated multiple master data management tools that the client had earlier maintained, that bred in silos and operational roadblocks, leading to issues at the customer end.
At the front end, Persistent re-engineered the client’s product landscape with a customer-friendly mobile application and a web portal for the municipal corporations the client serviced in the UK. These helped the client widen its customer reach, improve the overall quality of service with timely prompts on activities such as waste collection, address customer concerns in a time-bound manner, and keep municipal corporations updated with any price increases. These customer-facing portals helped the client establish a communication channel, which, when fed into optimized internal processes, led to faster resolution of complaints and better delivery of services.
Operational Efficiencies Lead to Productivity Improvement, Reduction in Revenue Leak
Persistent’s product-engineering mindset and consultative workshops with the client’s business users enabled the development of a digital application stack that delivered:
- 10% improvement in productivity due to reduced general and administrative work
- 20% uptick in revenue with operational efficiencies
- 30% reduction in the total cost of optimization with a cloud-hosted application stack
- Significant uptick in brand recall with user-friendly digital interfaces
