SAP(R) Solutions Selected by United Water to Improve Customer Service

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa., July 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- United Water, one of the largest water services companies in the United States, has selected solutions from SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) to help improve the quality and capabilities of its customer service operations. United Water provides water and wastewater services to 7.3 million people in the United States. In addition to owning and operating 20 regulated utilities, United Water operates over 220 municipal and industrial systems through public-private partnerships and contract agreements.  The company chose business intelligence (BI) and enterprise information management (EIM) solutions from the SAP® BusinessObjects™ portfolio to cultivate deeper understanding of its customer base and better manage its corporate data. The solutions will help enable the organization to identify trends and potential problems; set and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs); and provide accurate, real-time data to improve customer service.

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United Water selected solutions from SAP to integrate seamlessly with its existing applications. BI and EIM solutions from SAP will help the company extract data from its legacy system and create timely, accurate reports that help management to make key corporate decisions, and help enable hundreds of end-users to easily analyze and enhance information presented in all kinds of formats, such as reports, graphs or charts.

"After thoroughly reviewing solutions from a host of vendors, we found SAP offers the best investment value," said Ana Trujillo, VP and chief information officer, United Water. "By partnering with SAP, we can monitor our KPIs in real-time and distribute timely reports on service data across the company. This will benefit us in many ways. We will be able to improve our decision-making capabilities, improve the customer experience and increase operational efficiencies while providing customers with responsive, cost-efficient service."

SAP BusinessObjects Solutions Pour Fresh, New Life into Services and Operations

Integrating with the existing applications, SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions will provide United Water with flexible, granular reports on customer and transactional data. Managers in the field will be able to access and report on the latest service-request information on the fly. With detailed reporting on service data, United Water can drill down into individual requests to see if responses were made in person or over the phone and determine how long each case took to resolve. Users can even isolate and analyze data by zip codes that might have more service requests compared to other areas, and set unique KPI thresholds for particular geographic areas.

Using SAP BusinessObjects EIM solutions for data integration, data quality and data services means United Water can integrate and improve data from any application to create an accurate, holistic profile of each customer. These tools will help enable United Water to map legacy data into new systems accurately, process millions of records in a compressed timeframe, identify data quality issues and provide ongoing data validation and correction. SAP BusinessObjects EIM solutions integrate with United States Postal Service data to parse all customer records, correct incomplete addresses and remove duplicate records; for example, ensuring a "D. Smith," "David Smith" and "Dave Smith" are all matched as the right customer at the correct address.

"United Water is a great example of how companies use SAP BusinessObjects solutions to put customer service first," said Sanjay Poonen, executive vice president, SAP. "This is an organization that's been providing water services for millions of people since 1869, so it's exciting to see the company using new IT approaches to enhance its relationship with customers and empower employees to make smarter decisions for the business. It's also a testament to the best-of-breed abilities of our BI and EIM solutions to run in heterogeneous environments – to integrate, cleanse, profile, analyze and report on data – from source to dashboard."

About UNITED WATER

United Water provides water and wastewater services to 7.3 million people in the United States. In addition to owning and operating 20 regulated utilities, United Water operates over 220 municipal and industrial systems through public-private partnerships and contract agreements. The company's affiliate, Utility Service Company, is the nation's leading provider of long-term water tank management contracts with municipal and industrial clients. Founded in 1869, United Water is a subsidiary of the SUEZ ENVIRONNEMENT.

About SAP

SAP is the world's leading provider of business software(*), offering applications and services that enable companies of all sizes and in more than 25 industries to become best-run businesses. With more than 97,000 customers in over 120 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE, under the symbol "SAP." For more information, visit www.sap.com.

(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning, business intelligence, and related applications.

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