Anglian Water
How Anglian Water moved beyond Excel for Forecasting success
Anglian Water needed a way to produce customer calling and handle time forecasts for the billing, operations and debt recovery departments, and for over 400 back office workflows in a simple, easy to use way that didn’t require a high level of technical forecasting knowledge. Their objective was to become a Frontier forecasting department.
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The Challenge
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The forecasting team at Anglian Water was heavily reliant on forecasting in Excel, which required a high level of technical knowledge, offered limited models on what the business needed to forecast and provided no flexibility on inputting new drivers to provide the business the relevant insight
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Several internal teams that deal with customer calls relating to billing, metering and debt recovery and they needed a way to determine how many calls they would receive in the futureÂ
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With over 400 back office workstreams the forecasting team also needed a way to save time to enable the operational team to concentrate on high value workstreams
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A limited number of people could produce a forecast and when it was produced, it was not agile
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Goal to be a Frontier forecasting departmentÂÂ
The Solution
- Accessibility – a tool that was easy to use, allowing anyone to produce a forecast and deploy different models
- Agility – leading algorithms for forecast production at the touch of a button and can easily handle variations to forecasting dates or business drivers
- Transparency – easy to interpret graphical outputs of forecasting results allowing the user to see quickly if a forecast is viable or needs further refinement
- Compatibility – simple to export and import data making it easy to transition data to other software
- Support - easy to install application that avoided complex IT integration and supportÂ
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The Results
- Significant time and cost savings are continually being achieved by compared with excel based forecasting
- Forecasting team output has risen by 20%
- During volatile periods, including a 30% decrease in average weekly call volumes from 2013 to 2017, Forecaster has improved accuracy from 6.2% (2013) to 5.7% (2017)Â
- More time now available for employees to be trained on what makes a good forecast rather than on technical system buildsÂ
- The team at Anglian Water have been assessed by Forum Standards Benchmarking and were identified as one of the leading organisations, with forecasting particularly highlighted as ‘very strong’
Further information
If you want to hear more about we help organisations get ahead with Forecasting, get in contact +44 (0)20 7605 6081
