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April 2005

Thames Water select Business Collaborator (BC) to support over 1000 users on AMP4 projects

Thames Water have selected BC to support over 1000 users, on an anticipated 2000 AMP4 projects, budgeted to cost more than £3billion over a 5-year period.

Thames Water's 5-year Asset Management Programme (AMP4) began in April 2005. It is designed to ensure that the supply and quality of water meets the company's customers' expectations, and that the wastewater infrastructure can deal with predicted increases in volume. Since privatisation it is estimated that the UK water utility companies have invested approximately £50 billion in buying and maintaining assets. Many of these short and medium life assets, installed during the 1990s, will soon need replacing or modernising.

Business Collaborator Ltd (BCL) is a leading UK supplier of document management and collaboration solutions to the construction and utilities sectors. BCL will partner Thames Water to implement and support the process management required to successfully complete 2000 wide-ranging projects, in a limited timescale.

Of all the products Thames Water evaluated, BC was the only one that satisfied the organisation's key requirements. For example, BC gives Thames Water the ability to manage design collaboration within the supply chain, and to manage all the internal documentation related to each project. This is only possible because of the unique capabilities of the software, and its focus on pre-issue document management and collaboration, in addition to document issue and review. BC has given Thames Water a single solution that can be configured (per-project or per-programme) to meet the organisation's needs, and reflect, rather than determine, its processes. Thames Water view BC as a long term solution, providing on-going support for the AMP4 programme, but with the capability to be easily reconfigured to support future projects.

The Thames Water extranet, known as TWEXnet, will be rolled out to its extensive supply chain including Laing O'Rouke, MJ Gleeson and Costain, to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. Using BC 4.TEN, Business Collaborator's latest release, features such as templates will provide a standardised way of working across all projects, workspaces and documents, helping to speed up the setup of large numbers of projects.

Paul Meredith, Design Manager at Thames Water said:

“TWEXnet is fundamental in underpinning the business strategy for the delivery of the Thames Water Capital programme for the next 5 years. It will enable substantial business benefits, particularly reduced project delivery times, and enable true collaborative team working with our partners regardless of geographical location. The direct business benefits of having a single, controlled, source of live project information accessible across the internet will significantly improve our business efficiency and minimise the risk of costly errors. We are also cognisant of the environmental, and human, benefits in reducing the need for travel. ”

Sanjeev Shah, Group Director at Business Collaborator Ltd commented:

“Thames Water is a fantastic win for us. The Utilities sector presents a great opportunity for collaboration software and, likewise, our software can add real value to people working in this sector. As a Company, we are totally committed to ensuring that BC meets the needs of Utilities better than anyone else. We are delighted that a company with years of experience using such software chose BC to support this very important programme of works. ”