Enabling Digital Transformation While Minimizing Impact to Customer Bills

Yarra Valley Water manages more than AUD$5 billion worth of infrastructure and assets, supporting more than two million people and 58,000 businesses with water and sanitation services. As part of its five-year regulatory cycle, the organization began a digital transformation journey that includes upgrading and enhancing its aging systems. The organization committed to successfully executing their digital transformation - and deliver more value to customers - without impacting customer bills.

“Our work is highly regulated by the Victorian Government, and we have a responsibility to ensure we contain costs and deliver on the commitments we make in our five-year plan,” said Sandra Sanderson, head of ICT Operations, Yarra Valley Water. “Naturally, the Government has shown a keen interest in our digital transformation strategy and how it will impact their constituents, so we needed to find a way to upgrade our operations - and digitally transform - without impacting our service and without increasing customer bills.”

Rimini Street Fuels Digital Transformation, Customer and Regulatory Compliance

Rimini Street presented Yarra Valley Water with a unique opportunity to reduce cost whilst maintaining (and enhancing) existing service levels. The move aligns with the organization’s transformation goals and cost containment strategy by ensuring that technology spend is prudent and focused in areas that provide the greatest value. With enhanced service quality and a significant reduction in annual support fees, the savings not only fuel the utility’s digital transformation agenda, but also ensure its ability to continue delivering on its commitment to keep bills flat for customers, in compliance with its regulatory obligations.

As with all Rimini Street clients, Yarra Valley Water is assigned a Primary Support Engineer with an average of 20 years of specialized enterprise software experience, as well as a team of functional and technical engineers, delivering Rimini Street’s industry-leading service level agreement of 10-minute response times for all Priority 1 cases. Its true follow-the-sun model offers a seamless customer experience around the clock, every day of the year.

“We already see significant value from the switch to Rimini Street,” said Sanderson. “They even stepped up prior to the full transition to help with an outage, getting us back up and running quickly. Rimini Street is the definition of ‘peace of mind’ - proving to be a genuine partner that can deliver 24/7/365 service, particularly in a time of crisis.”

“We are pleased to partner with Yarra Valley Water to help them achieve their long-term customer experience and digital transformation goals,” said Daniel Benad, group vice president and regional general manager, Oceania, Rimini Street. “As a trusted partner, our goal is to enable our clients to rely on our support team with absolute confidence, allowing them to turn their focus to other business priorities, such as digital transformation, customer innovation, cost containment and compliance activities - all under the umbrella of faster, broader and higher quality support.”