Digitalization and innovation at Vitens
Placing an order within an Excel sheet, according to Vitens, that had to change. That is why we developed an portal, where municipalities and contractors can place an order quickly and error-free, and all this digitally.
About Vitens
Every day, Vitens extracts, purifies and supplies 1 billion liters of drinking water up to the water meter at Vitens' customers. After the water meter, it is the customer's responsibility. How does a municipality or contractor get the materials to actually let water flow from the tap? This all happens within the new portal.
The importance of automation
About 1200 different materials, which are mostly under the street, such as water pipes, wells, bolts, nuts and valves are supplied by Vitens. Ordering these articles used to be done via an Excel sheet, municipalities and contractors could indicate on this sheet what they wanted to order. This entailed a number of disadvantages. Think of articles and prices that were not up to date, which in turn leads to additional contact with the customer, to the manual processing of all orders placed in the Vitens backend system. For both the customer and Vitens, this is very labour-intensive and very prone to errors.
Digitizing this process was therefore of great importance!
By automating this work, you immediately save on costs: there is no more manual work and no coordination in connection with incorrect orders due to, for example, items that cannot be delivered anymore.
Alex Ubbink, Software Engineer Iquality
The portal
Municipalities and contractors can easily place an order within the application portal. Before doing this, of course, they need to log in. Azure AD B2B is used for this. This means that they can log in with their own network account and therefore do not need a separate username and password. Furthermore, several business partners (customer numbers) can be linked to the account of the contractor or municipality, without needing separate login accounts for this.
In addition, data from these business partners, as well as order history, are stored and retrieved through a link with Vitens' back-end system (SAP).
It is clear that the application portal delivers the same result. Alex Ubbink, Software Engineer at Iquality explains: "By automating this work you immediately save on costs: there is no manual work and no coordination in connection with incorrect orders due to, for example, items that can no longer be delivered."
Digital innovation
Would you like to join us in looking at which solution is right for you? Contact us for an introduction!
