Wipro bags deal from UK-based utility firm Thames Water

Wipro on Thursday said it has bagged a multi-year deal from the UK-based utility firm Thames Water to transform the company's customer service and retail billing capabilities. No financial details were disclosed.

Thames Water, which is the UK's largest water and waste water services provider, serves 15 million customers in London and the Thames Valley region.

Wipro is working in partnership with EY to support the business change and readiness aspect of this transformation programme. As part of the contract, Wipro will be developing new IT systems and processes to help Thames Water improve customer experience and drive operational efficiencies, the Indian firm said in a statement.

A significant objective of this transformation programme is to enable Thames Water compete effectively in the new Open Water deregulated market, it added.

From April 2017, 1.2 million business/non-household customers in the UK will have the right to choose their water supplier, making it the largest retail water market in the world.

Wipro will help Thames Water implement SAP industry solution for utilities billing along with a new market integration gateway and a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

This programme will replace a 20-year old legacy billing platform and is designed to help simplify customer experience and introduce greater flexibility for Thames Water.

"The integrated solution that will be rolled out is intended to help Thames Water capture a single and unified view of each customer and will thereby, provide us with deeper insights about them, through analytics," Thames Water MD Customer Service and Retail Ian Cain said.

In a separate statement, Wipro said it has implemented its software as a service platform -- Managed File Transfer as a Service (MFTaaS) -- on Amazon Web Sevices (AWS) for organisations, thereby helping them integrate digitally with their clients, partners and employees.

Wipro anticipates the MFTAaaS platform can potentially reduce up to 30% in total cost of ownership (TCO) for its clients vis-a-vis traditional deployments, it added.