Queensland Urban Utilities moves to cloud, implements website self-service

Queensland water distributor/retailer Queensland Urban Utilities (QUU) has embarked on IT projects designed to reduce costs such as cloud computing and website self-service.

In September 2014, QUU placed its human resources and payroll system in the cloud. QUU CIO Nina Meyers said the utility firm decided to look at cloud computing in areas where it could add value to the organisation. The organisation’s HR/payroll system was complex to manage and contained many data sets so this was chosen as a prime candidate for migration to the cloud.

The system was migrated into the cloud after the rollout of Infor’s CloudSuite Public Sector software suite was completed on September 15, 2014.

The software suite provides government organisations with tools to integrate legacy applications, collaborate across the enterprise and lower the cost of ownership for software solutions.

“Infor has achieved what we wanted in terms of timeframes, agility and delivering value to the organisation,” said Meyers.

QUU may look at moving more systems into the cloud if it makes business sense, she added.

“Whether it is myself as an executive member or the board, it’s about looking at the options available at one point in time and considering which benefit provides us with the best customer experience, best return on investment [ROI] and lowest risk.”

QUU also recently completed a re-development of its website. This is designed to offer QUU customers self-service options such as reporting a fault.

“If QUU customers want to report a water leak, they can upload a photo to the website and indicate how large the leak is,” she said.

“When you are talking to someone on the phone, there can be quite a diversity of image when someone says it is a [water] burst. Having a photo and extra information helps our staff deal in responsive way to those calls for service.”

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