On Wednesday evening the 25th of April the award ceremony of the Publica Awards 2018 took place for the third time. De Watergroep and Devoteam’s project “Integration as unifying factor for digital transformation” participated in the Technology category. In this category the most innovative project with advanced technological and value-adding solutions was rewarded. And you can probably guess it: we won the audience award!
Two of the most important people in the project: Cristina Orodel, IT Portfolio Manager at De Watergroep (left) and Stephan Ansems, Senior Architecture Consultant at Devoteam (right).
The Publica 2018 Award Ceremony
This award, organized by EBP together with Bouwkroniek and La Chronique, honors public actors, their partners and their cooperation. More than 200 guests, with numerous representatives from the construction sector, attended the successful gala evening at Hotel Le Plaza.
The evening started with an interesting debate between five Belgian government officials about governance in the Belgian Public sector. After a drink and project exhibitions it was finally time for the Publica 2018 award ceremony. Among the different innovative projects in the Technology category, our project with De Watergroep was received as the best one by the audience, receiving a stunning 56 votes from 217 voters. While collecting our award on the podium, De Watergroep was highlighted as an inspiration for other companies by one of the jurys. This due to the amount of innovative digitization innitiatives the company has completed and is still working on, which also led to two additional awards for De Watergroep. New projects (with Devoteam) to digitize the company and enhance value for its customers even further are already in the pipeline.
Our project: Integration as unifying factor for digital transformation
With 3 million customers, 175 municipalities, 30,000 kilometers of water supply and more than 1,500 employees, De Watergroep is the largest drinking water company in Flanders.
Mid 2016, De Watergroep took the initiative to start an ambitious digital transformation process, with the main goal of improving operational excellence with the focus on social interest. This has led to:
- Faster response times to 3 million customers experiencing a leakage or malfunction in the more than 30,000 kilometers of water pipelines by digitizing the issuing of work instructions to service engineers.
- Increased productivity for De Watergroep’s staff (1,500 people) through self-service solutions. From 6 to 8 productive working hours per day by removing waiting times and digitizing time-consuming administrative processes.
- Linking the new software systems and issuing the right data to different Front-End and Back-End systems through a new integration architecture connected to an API management platform.
Next up: Computable Awards 2018
For this Dutch Award, honoring technological innovations in the Netherlands and Belgium, we have been chosen to present our project to a jury, meaning we already left 36 of the 46 participants behind us. After this presentation five finalists will be rewarded to present their case during the Computable Awards gala in October. We will keep you updated!
Download the Publica 2018 project catalog
Interested in all the other participating projects?
