Sydney Water Case Study

Sydney Water is Australia’s largest urban water utility, supplying around 1.4 billion litres each day to over 4.4 million people in Sydney, the Illawarra and the Blue Mountains.

An awarded corporate citizen with a strong commitment to the environment, Sydney Water recycles 92 million litres of water every day, has built a series of co and hydro generation renewable energy plants and was presented the Public Water Agency of the Year 2010 award at the Global Water Intelligence Conference in Paris. Sydney Water is committed to being carbon neutral by 2020 and is on target to be 60% carbon neutral by 2012.

Sydney Water is equally committed to its 3000-strong workforce, implementing several schemes across their organisation focused on safety, work-life balance, staff development, staff engagement, staff satisfaction and key behaviours. In recent years Sydney Water received recognition at both the 2010 HR Leadership Awards and 2009 Diversity@Work Awards.

Planning for the future
Before implementing R.Review, Sydney Water used spreadsheets to manage their annual remuneration review process. This approach placed a large administrative burden on the HR team who would spend hours, even days checking data for compliance and accuracy, compiling reports and preparing letters. This meant that Sydney Water’s review process was restricted to Senior Management and their staff. "Using spreadsheets involved a lot of extra work. Checking and mail merging of letters caused a longer timeframe for the remuneration process than was necessary. The risk potential for our future process was unacceptable." Paul Adams, Reward and Recognition Manager, Sydney Water.

As part of their ongoing commitment to improved staff engagement and development, Sydney Water plans to extend their existing remuneration review process to encompass more employees and directly involve more managers in the review process. They recognised that they would need a remuneration review system sophisticated enough to handle their requirements for budget-modelling, live-reporting, approval hierarchy, performance measures, salary-bands and recommendation calculations. The system also had to be simple and intuitive to use so as to maximise uptake by managers and minimise the requirement for change-management and training from HR.

Choosing the best solution
Sydney Water not only needed a system that met all of their functional requirements but also needed a vendor who could meet their service needs and implementation schedule. The leading vendors of HRIS systems, payroll systems, compensation management and remuneration review systems were invited to tender for the project. After an extensive tender assessment process involving demonstrations, reference checks, security and IT compliance checks, Sydney Water selected R.Review.

R.Review is designed, developed and supported by Remesys, a wholly Australian owned company specialising in online remuneration and performance software.

The Experience
Remesys provided Sydney Water with direct access to a remuneration specialist and a dedicated implementation consultant throughout implementation, user-acceptance testing and the remuneration review. "The Remesys consultants were excellent, very helpful and always available when help was required." April Hunter, Senior HR Consultant.

Remesys’ remuneration specialists consulted with Sydney Water’s HR team, and Remesys delivered a configured solution that incorporated all of Sydney Water’s required fields, salary-bands, modelling metrics, reports, budget structures, recommendation calculations and guidelines. R.Review was configured using Sydney Water’s terminology, process-flows and business rules, which greatly reduced the learning-curve usually associated with a new system.

"We finished two weeks early!" April Hunter, Senior HR Consultant

Sydney Water’s first year using R.Review was a great success, greatly reducing the administrative burden on the HR Team and meeting all requirements for the 2011 review. "R.Review enabled our process to be more streamlined and reduced the completion time of the review for 550 senior managers by approx. two weeks. Letters were quick and easy. The system is easy to use and provides the flexibility for managers to change TRP increases when required." Paul Adams, Reward and Recognition Manager.

Sydney Water now look forward, with confidence, to extending their 2012 review process to more staff and managers using R.Review to streamline and manage the process.

Download a copy of the Sydney Water case study here