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Improved Financial Management with help from Eclipse
Hobart Water is Tasmania’s largest supplier of drinking water for use in homes and businesses. It was formed in 1997 when the Tasmanian State Government handed ownership of the old Hobart Regional Water Board to the eight major local councils in and around Hobart.
Hobart Water’s key customers are its eight owner Councils. Hobart Water’s role is to monitor and help protect drinking water catchment areas, collect and treat water and pipe it to dams and reservoirs located around the city. Local councils take water from these reservoirs and reticulate (pipe) it throughout their municipalities.
As outlined in its current Strategic Corporate Plan, it is Hobart Water’s intention to continue to improve its current core business of supplying quality water to the Council customers as well as pursue market opportunities to provide services based on its core business competencies. As Hobart Water grows its business, it will require the information systems to support this direction.
In 2002, Hobart Water undertook a review of its financial management information system and realised that it needed a system that would not only provide better financial functionality and reporting but also integrate with other business systems including asset maintenance, resource scheduling and job costing. Hobart Water chose Microsoft Business Solutions to assist with the solution design, and in mid-2003 implemented Microsoft Navision in order to achieve the company’s functional requirements.
Customised for specific business requirements and allowing for future growth. The solution’s financial backbone is a multi-dimensional structure that allows Hobart Water’s mixture of operating entities and operational cost centres to use just one system to provide a comprehensive range of financial information. For example, accountants can review maintenance costs whilst engineers can examine their capital works expenditure. With its integrated development environment, the solution allows Hobart Water to quickly adapt to changing business conditions and environments.
Because information can be entered into the database in one application area, which is simultaneously available for use in other application areas, Hobart Water is able to accurately obtain financial information for all of its business activities. This allows the “out-of-the-box” application to be streamlined to meet the business requirements while preparing Hobart Water for its future growth.
In late 2005, Hobart Water migrated to Eclipse Computing as its preferred solution provider. Eclipse was able to provide a greater depth of experience and technical knowledge of the Navision application with Hobart Water’s customisations.
Eclipse consultants have helped Hobart Water further enhance its business processes while providing support for change management issues.
In early 2006, Eclipse supported an enhancement to Hobart Water’s sales and receivables module to allow direct billing to its offpeak and waysider customers. At present, further enhancements to the jobs (projects) management module are being implemented.
Eclipse consultants were praised by Hobart Water for their depth of understanding of the processes and internal issues affecting Hobart Water across all projects.
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