Sydney Water and finao: A Partnership in Digitalisation and Innovation

‍The Background

Sydney Water’s mission is to serve Sydney’s 5 million customers and keep Sydney’s water safe, secure and sustainable. Sydney Water is highly focused on digital innovation and sustainability – both for the environment and its business. By partnering with finao, they have achieved their goal of improving operational efficiency, enhancing data accessibility, and ensuring the reliability of services for customers.

Challenge

With a complex network of systems, data and processes, Sydney Water was looking to systematically become more efficient and dematerialising its many business processes and related forms and workflows. As a highly regulated critical government infrastructure, Sydney Water faces a unique set of challenges, which includes maintaining the highest level of data and cyber security, privacy and governance. Given their critical role in managing and delivering public water services, the key business focus is to reduce manual processes, streamline workflows, improve data-driven decision-making, and reinforce system resilience. 

Solution

With finao’s strategic approach and expertise in business process analysis and design, we leveraged our core product, finao PRIME as the ideal platform from which to build a bespoke solution. Infinitely adaptable, scalable and customisable, adopting our platform meant there was no need for Sydney Water to invest in creating its own application or replacing it as its needs evolved – resulting in an efficient and sustainable solution.

As a highly secure cloud-based application, it also meant that users could securely and easily login immediately into a platform that is always online. Importantly, the platform would continue to:

• Grow and evolve with the organisation’s requirements
• Have scope to innovate with AI and changing technology
• Be sustainable and future proof

Results

By partnering with the finao team over the past 14 years, Sydney Water has successfully digitalised and dematerialised its business model with a custom solution that delivers not only efficiency, but plenty of scope to grow and evolve with their organisational goals and requirements.

 Together, we provide the essentials for this unique public service business and critical government infrastructure:

• System simplicity and intuitive interface
• State-of-the-art smarts
• Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IaaS) with 24/7 support
• Operational resilience and the highest level of security (cloud-based, cyber security, ISO27001 and SOC 2 compliant)
• Australian government compliance (SCM00020)
• Delivered on on any device, any format and orientation
• Data-driven decision-making and governance, through delivering highly structured and uniform data integrated from various sources
• System integration with existing systems and bespoke operational technology (OT)
• Facilitating real-time monitoring of infrastructure performance to preemptively address issues

Quick Success Stats

Throughout this successful collaboration with Sydney Water, finao has delivered a remarkable:

• 1,000,000 plus forms submitted (equating to nearly 10 forms per hour, every hour, for 14 years)
• Each form averaging 52 fields, this amounts to more than 52 million data points captured
• Users have uploaded nearly 5 terabytes of data across more than 1.5 million files during this period
• An impressive uptime record of 99.9999% maintained consistently over the past decade

This is a testament to the robustness of the platform and the finao team’s rigorous management and oversight, high standards of service and collaboration for a responsive, secure, data-driven and sustainable water services system for the community.