Scottish Water

Scottish Water is a publicly owned company providing water and wastewater services to the whole of Scotland. The company provides 1.3 billion litres of drinking water to five million customers in 2.4 million households, and takes away 840 million litres of wastewater daily.

Headquartered in Dunfermline, Scottish Water employs almost 3,400 people across Scotland. The organisation is the fourth largest water and wastewater service provider in the United Kingdom, with offices in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Inverness.

The Challenge

Scottish Water created an Agile Working Program led by Shirley Campbell, Scottish Water’s Director of People, Workplace, and Organization Development. Agile working in Scottish Water is about empowering its people to work where, how, and when they choose, maximizing productivity and delivering the greatest value to Scottish Water’s customers.

“We’re passionate about the health and well-being of our people,” Shirley said. “We want employees to use Web and teleconferencing and work from their own locations instead of spending so much time in their cars. Agile working benefits our staff in terms of their health, well-being and ownership of their own work/life balance.”

The design of a new National Operations Centre created an opportunity for the organisation to showcase its new program, which used a hot-desking and resource-sharing system to reduce desks by 25 percent. The only thing missing was a solution to manage the new workplace. Email was used to book rooms, but there was no management information to track utilization.

Additionally, there was no desk reservation system for employees, which wasted time and frustrated employees. Scottish Water needed an agile working process that enabled sharing and collaboration.

The Solution

Scottish Water considered four different vendors during its evaluation process, focusing on value, quality, expert resources, and implementation capability. They selected Asure Software AsureSpace® Workspace Manager 4.5 as the clear winner. “Asure helped us shape the end solution, understanding our core requirement, then advising us on how to customise the application to achieve our goals,” Shirley said. “The end result is a system which is extremely intuitive and easy to use.”

Scottish Water’s Agile Program Manager, Malcolm Hunter, said he was impressed with Asure’s guarantee to complete implementation within 90 days, as the date to for moving into a new building was looming. “We actually achieved our deadline and the system was fully tested and operational by our move-in date,” said Malcolm. “Desk estate was optimised to deliver £5m in construction and running-costs savings.”

Winning the hearts and minds of employees was also important. Staff satisfaction increased, with Workspace Manager regularly used by approximately 1,500 people to book desks (team zones and hot desks) and meeting rooms. Employees loved the kiosks and mobile application, and became more confident in hot-desking.

AsureSpace provided reports for desks and rooms, making better, more informed decisions a reality for Scottish Water. For the future, Scottish Water plans to roll out Workspace Manager, hardware and software to four additional offices, and evaluate Asure’s Visitor Management and Catering services.

The Results

Along with Asure’s guarantee of a fully operational solution implemented in 90 days, Shirley pointed out several other reasons for choosing AsureSpace® Workspace Manager. “The cost model based on resources was very appealing and provides good value for money,” Shirley said. “The usability of the product was demonstrated at people events, and we received excellent feedback from our people. Ease of access and authentication through integration with employee identification badges is also a big plus. Its intuitiveness points to the fact that it was built as a cloud application, not converted from an on-premise platform.”

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