Thames Water Consolidating and simplifying for savings

Conveyancing – the process of moving legal ownership of property or land from one

person to another – requires, among other things, up-to-date information from the local

water utility. As the third largest water utility in the world, Thames Water answers more

than 250,000 conveyancing requests annually, at a cost of several million British

pounds. The company needed to reduce costs, provide faster, more reliable service, and

be able to implement new policies and regulations quickly. It also wanted to prepare for

a sharp increase in conveyancing requests prompted by new regulations.

Thames Water uses ILOG JRules in a new software solution that streamlines the utility’s

conveyancing service. The market-leading business rule management system (BRMS)

enables the utility to centrally process conveyancing data. Called the Asset Data

Services Decision Making Engine (ADSDME), the new solution centralizes the business

rules used to implement decisions, and empowers policy managers to update the rules

directly through an easy-to-use interface. The 30 employees once needed to manually

process requests have been reassigned, a move expected to save Ł3 million (US$5.4

million) over five years. The company also expects to generate Ł1.4 million (US$2.52

million) in the same period by detecting and charging unbilled properties. ADSDME has

halved the utility’s response time from four days to two, and the company can extend its

conveyancing service to cover smaller utilities.

ILOG JRules allows Thames Water employees to directly add or modify the business rules used by

ADSDME, making it easier for the utility to remain compliant with ever-changing laws and regulations. It

also reduces the number of manual inter ventions required to ensure the accuracy of the conveyancing

information. The BRMS stores the rules in a central repository, so any changes or additions to the rules

can be made easily and applied throughout the system. Using a simple point-and-click interface that

also suppor ts rule deployment, the system’s five business administrators are able to make changes in

real time through rules written in plain business English. This simplicity has made it much easier for

users to share and implement new ideas, since suggestions can be quickly modeled at little extra cost

to the company. The system can also be adapted to handle the conveyancing requests submitted to

other water companies, giving Thames Water another source of revenue.

Thames Water has experienced several benefits from using ILOG JRules in ADSDME, including:

Expected savings of more than Ł3 million (US$5.4 million) from automating the ser vice’s manual

processes and reassigning the employees once responsible for implementing the processes

Expected additional income of Ł1.4 million (US$2.52 million) over the next five years from

detecting and properly charging unbilled properties

Real-time compliance with policies and regulations

Faster customer service through halved response time (two days instead of four)

More accurate and reliable information given to customers through consistent application of

ILOG Professional Services worked with Thames Water and Wipro Technologies, the ILOG partner

responsible for the end-to-end development and implementation of ADSDME. ILOG’s consultants

helped define and implement the comprehensive set of business rules used by the system to

automate the manual tasks for gathering conveyancing data and identifying unbilled or incorrectly billed

properties. The system is run on a WebSphere application server with Windows 2000. Data is called

form an SQL database, mainframe billing system and the Autodesk GIS system.

Thames Water provides sewage ser vices to 13 million people and drinking water to 8

million people. The company’s supply area covers 5,000 square miles that include London

and the Thames Valley. The utility manages 20,000 miles of water mains and 40,000 miles

of sewers – enough pipes to circle the world more than twice.

ILOG delivers software and services that empower customers to make better decisions faster and manage change

and complexity. Over 2,000 global corporations and more than 400 leading software vendors rely on ILOG’s market-

leading business rule management system (BRMS), optimization and visualization software components, to achieve

dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products and services, and sharpen their competitive edge.

The BRMS market share leader, ILOG was founded in 1987 and employs more than 600 people worldwide.

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