NWC taps TCS to integrate Saudi water supply system

Overview

The National Water Company (NWC), a Saudi joint stock company wholly owned by the government, was established in 2008 to provide water and wastewater treatment services in four major cities of Saudi Arabia—Riyadh, Jeddah, Makkah, and Taif. The rest of the kingdom was serviced by 13 directorates reporting directly to the ministry of water and agriculture. This was sought to be consolidated and NWC was given the transformational task of integrating all the directorates and the four city-based units into six clusters for all matters functional, legal, and administrative, all within a short span of 18 months. A large-scale program called One-NWC was launched.

Challenges

NWC formed a strategic transformation partnership with TCS to roll out ERP across all clusters, seeking a digital solution to address the following challenges:

• Move from a cash-based accounting system to an accrual-based one to meet the International Finance Reporting Standard compliance norms
• Fix NWC’s disjointed back-end business processes with its associated challenges • Streamline disjointed supply chain systems, which led to challenges in inventory management and procurement processes
• Align fragmented HR policies and practices to homogenize HR functioning across the distribution sector
• Cleanse and upgrade NWC data quality for effective business decision-making
• Provide multi-lingual access in the NWC ERP systems for all employees
• Facilitate user acceptance training for critical users and end users in 13 locations nationwide, and also stepping up to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic