Anglian Water taps Documill for error-free invoicing

“We’re here to help and we want all our customers to be able to communicate with us in a way that works for them”, says Chris Douglas, Project and Systems Manager at Anglian Water Wholesale Services. For the company, it is certainly all about easy-to-access services with a great user experience. 

Ensuring competition in the world’s largest private water supply market 

Anglian Water Wholesale Services operates in the world’s largest competitive water supply market. It ensures that non-household customers such as businesses, charities and public sector organizations can choose, whom they receive their water and wastewater retail services from. 

The company is responsible for the provision of safe and clean drinking water, water fitting regulations, clearing network flooding associated with its sewers and trade effluent, as well as recycling used water.  

Ensuring competition this way is expected to bring better services, prices and innovation to non-household customers.

“We focus solely on the non-household market providing a single point of access for all the retailers within the Anglian Water and Hartlepool Water regions”, says Chris.

Anglian Water Wholesale Services’ network supplies and transports water across an area of 27,500 square km on the east coast of England, right to the north of London.

Pipes that would span a quarter of the way to the moon

Anglian Water has a whopping 112,833 km of water and sewer pipes – enough to stretch across a quarter of the way to the moon. They supply and transport water across an area of 27,500 km².

Its production output is no less than 1.1 giga liters of drinking water and 0.9 giga liters of recycled water per day. That is equivalent to draining the whole water body of Lake Derwentwater in a little more than two weeks.

Anglian Water’s output is equivalent to draining the whole water body of Lake Derwentwater in a little more than two weeks.”

Protecting the environment – and own business

“Our region is the driest and lowest situated in the UK, with over 1,200 km of coastline. This makes us quite vulnerable to the effects of climate change”, says Chris.

Small wonder, then, that protecting the environment is also high on the agenda of Anglian Water, along with supporting and protecting wildlife. The health of the region’s rivers is one important concern. It has led the company to partner in radical ways with farmers, landowners, river groups and other global leaders to improve river health – for the benefit of the environment, but also for the company’s capability to do business.

Business with businesses

“Our Wholesale Service Centre is a dedicated market services team within our Wholesale Services Business Unit. The Service Centre aims to provide a top-class wholesale service to the retailers wishing to serve contestable end-user customers under the existing competition mechanisms of Ofwat (the Water Services Regulation Authority for England and Wales). The team provides a single point of access for all the retailers within the Anglian Water and Hartlepool Water regions.”

Documill eliminates errors – and helps save a little time as a bonus

Nevertheless, the desire to help and provide top service applies to Chris’s team as much as any other at Anglian Water.

And this is where Documill comes in – or actually did so already in 2017, when Anglian Water started operations. Anglian Water uses Documill to automate invoice generation. This makes an interesting use case, as it is not about producing great volumes of documents, as usual with document automation.

Currently, just circa 20 invoices are produced per month using Documill. This will be grown to 40-45 in this quarter.

“There is a little bit of time saved per invoice – 5 to 10 minutes – but this is just a nice bonus.”

These invoices to the retailers carry a high value. Document automation is important in eliminating manual errors and ensuring consistent quality to them.”

If there is an error in the invoice, it can be a pain to many people on the customer’s side – and Anglian Water’s, too. And it has negative consequences for the business.

“Correcting an issue with the invoice could lead to a delay in receiving the payment, impacting cash flow.”

And there is the burden of unnecessary extra effort.

“If there is something wrong with the invoice, it causes additional work for our finance sector and non-household commercial team within wholesale market services.”

“Not to mention the additional work and trouble this causes to our customers, undermining our reputation.”

Why Documill?

And why did Anglian Water choose Documill for document generation?

“I wasn’t here when it was first put in place, but I’ve been managing Documill at Anglian Water for the last 5-6 years, including making changes and developing new templates.”

“And based on my experience, I’d say one reason to choose Documill was that we can manage it in-house. It’s a very simple, effective platform that we can support and use inside our Salesforce. And, just the scale of it is suitable for the size of our business and the amount that we use it.”

It feels like your application scales from the smallest to extremely large.”

Five-star customer support

And what about your relationship with Documill?

“The relationship has been really good. I’ve simply never had any issues at all.”

“There’s plenty of content online in terms of guiding me through changes and support. Whenever I’ve had problems or needed to make queries, they have been responded to very quickly and resolved. Support is always available in various forms.”

“I’ve worked with Kris, who has been an absolute star, working with me learning Documill and producing suitable templates for the business. I could not praise him enough. Thank you Kris!”

“We’re currently working on automating some more invoices that are likely to be a bit more complex, doubling the output to about 40-45 invoices per month. I had a chat with Mark McGinn of Documill just the other day about maybe utilizing some services from Documill to set up the automation for those – let’s see…

“Yeah, certainly it has been a very good experience.”