Bristol Water outsources IT as business model transforms

Bristol Water is benefitting from the outsourcing of its core business software during a period of major changes to its operating model.

The company faced its business being broken up in a similar way to how gas and electricity suppliers did, with wholesale, retail and treatment businesses separated. This impacts on IT systems and the small IT department, which has around 8 people, that would have to dedicate time and effort to this.

For example, the separation of its retail business, which sells to customers, from its wholesale business involved connecting its systems to a retail market. This presents major challenges around data.

To this end, the company needed to find a partner that could take over the management of IT to free up resources.

Ben Newby, customer services and IT director at Bristol Water, said the company is “heavily outsourced” in terms of IT.

Its major systems – such as finance, asset management, customer relationship management, and supplier relationship management – are SAP, while IT infrastructure is mainly Microsoft and Cisco.

“In 2013, we needed to select a IT partner that could not only deliver the service, but support the IT changes we needed during this period,” said Newby.

It selected a managed service from Indian IT services company Wipro, as its scale was attractive to Bristol Water. Newby said the organisation is a small business, but has a complicated SAP landscape.

“We are as complicated as companies 15 times as big as us,” added Newby. “We needed someone with the right breadth of skills.”

Before the outsource, Bristol Water tendered for all the different areas of IT needed support. The result was lots of different suppliers, including boutique companies, running for the business.

“I would end up being the integrator of all these services, but this is difficult because we are small. Thames Water has the scale to do this, but for us it is difficult to manage all those different suppliers.

He said Wipro’s work with gas and electricity companies was also important. For example, in 2014, UK Gas distribution company Xoserve outsourced its legacy application replacement project to Wipro in a seven-year deal.