Yarra Valley Water

VIC T OR IA, AU S T R AL IA

WAT E R S E R VIC E S

620 E M P L OY E E S

About Yarra Valley Water

Yarra Valley Water is the largest of Melbourne’s three

water corporations, employing 620 people and

providing water supply and sewerage services to people

and businesses in the northern and eastern suburbs of

Melbourne.

Islands of information

Yarra Valley Water needed to provide a way for

employees to access information centrally and quickly,

as well as providing social networking opportunities.

The organisation decided to create an intranet platform

that would provide information on everything from

company policies, news, events, operational

information and applications. It was envisioned that the

intranet could become a collaboration and social hub

that would enhance organisational knowledge.

Leigh Berrell, CIO and GM of Business Technology

Services, Yarra Valley Water, said, “There were already

several unmanaged and unstructured information

environments in the organisation but the resulting

islands of information weren’t searchable and therefore

not useful. We needed to find a way to bring all of this

information together and make it easy to use,

searchable and scalable.”

Head and shoulders above the rest

Potential solutions already in the organisation were

carefully considered before the decision was made to

build the new intranet on SharePoint 2013.

Leigh said, “We already had many versions of

SharePoint in place so we could see how we could

achieve our goals. SharePoint 2013 was head and

shoulders above the rest.”

Yarra Valley Water chose SharePoint 2013 because of its

flexible user interface, the integration of enterprise

social functionality, and the fact that it tied in well with

the organisation’s existing Microsoft Office

environment.

“SharePoint took away the pain of managing important policy and procedure documents and greatly improved governance around these documents.”

A SharePoint expert

After deciding to proceed with SharePoint, Yarra Valley

Water identified a need to partner with a SharePoint

expert to implement the new intranet platform. The

organisation chose OBS after completing a market scan

and request for proposal to find the best SharePoint

practitioner for its needs.

Leigh said, “OBS strongly demonstrated their experience

and have been SharePoint experts for a long time. They

had good reference sites and presented well. We

needed them to bring their previous experience to bear

for our project, to provide recommendations and help

us understand what we wanted to do, rather than

simply executing what we asked for.

“OBS isn’t just a SharePoint code expert. They could talk

about how to run an internet portal, best practices in

facilitating searches and organising information and

providing suggestions about things we could do.”

An excellent outcome

The project is still underway but the first phase is

complete, providing Yarra Valley Water with a new

corporate communications platform. The new intranet

offers corporate news, announcements, safety

information, events calendar and even the canteen

menu, all of which is easily searchable and accessible.

Leigh said, “We have built an employee hub that

provides information for employees such as pay, annual

leave, conditions, benefits, employment lifecycle,

facilities and how to use them, learning and developing,

health and safety, expense reimbursements, and an

internal job board all in one place.

It provides

links so

employees can

actually complete

tasks like expense

reports right from the

intranet, making them much

more efficient.

“There is also a community hub that brings like-minded

workers together and lets them share knowledge with

each other on social and work-related topics.”

The organisation is moving a number of business

processes online using Nintex Workflow. This will

reduce manual processes and increase efficiencies. For

example, incomplete forms will not be sent for

approvals until the original person completes them

correctly. Some parts of the process have also been

eliminated altogether, freeing up employees to work on

other tasks.

Important documents are now more tightly-managed

using SharePoint, increasing the organisation’s

compliance and reducing workloads further.

Leigh said, “SharePoint took away the pain of managing

important policy and procedure documents and greatly

improved governance around these documents. “We’ve

saved many thousands of hours in labour each year.”

“We have an excellent outcome that works well, is

functional and will continue to serve us well into the

future.”

“OBS isn’t just a SharePoint code expert. They could talk about how to run an internet portal, best practices in facilitating searches and organising information and providing suggestions…” Leigh Berrell | CIO and GM of Business Technology Services | Yarra Valley Water