ACOMPANY translates Aquafin innovation project into strategic program

Aquafin is responsible for the transportation and treatment of public wastewater in Flanders and also manages part of the sewers. In addition, the company offers services and expert advice to cities and municipalities on water management. Through its subsidiary Aquaplus, Aquafin also works for industrial clients. “Aquafin offers a sustainability contribution to Flanders,” says Maarten Raemdonck, Head of Innovation at Aquafin. “It is our mission and vision to provide clean waterways for future generations and a living environment in harmony with water.” His innovation business unit is constantly exploring which innovative ideas can lead to a business case, then they try to make that business case a reality. One such previous project resulted in ROSI – a digital platform that gives cities and towns insight into the condition of their sewers, the works taking place, the costs involved….

Wanted: conceptual thinkers with technical baggage

ROSI was immediately well-received by its target audience, and currently the platform boasts 110 cities and municipalities as customers. That prompted the innovation team to knit a sequel to ROSI v1. “We assumed that three things would be important as the next step for cities and municipalities,” says An Dufour, Corporate Innovator at Aquafin. “We were thinking of a triptych of new services to be optimized: digitization of our service around sewer repair, advising cities and municipalities around climate-robust design, and we also wanted to include mapping of the status of the road surface in order to find synergies and propose the right repair or reconstruction at the right time.”

To get to work on that, Aquafin sought an innovation partner who could both conceptually collaborate on redefining the business model and who had the necessary technical baggage to make proposals for the digital product that was to be the result of the exercise. During the first part of the Rosi program, Aquafin found that it was not always easy to put the intended transformation in business model into practice. For example, they encountered a number of administrative problems when switching from invoicing based on hours worked to a system with a fixed amount per type of inspection or even per year. It was not easy to innovate so thoroughly on the business model, adapt the existing administrative model and get the entire organization on board.

ACOMPANY was chosen as a partner to define a follow-up program, in part because of its structured and detailed plan of approach with a strong focus on co-creation, and its proven experience with similar use cases. ACOMPANY is an innovation and digital transformation agency: innovation stands for conceptual thinking while transformation is about embedding in the organization via the ‘people, process, technology’ framework.

Link between strategy and tactics

Rather than dive straight into the depths of the project, ACOMPANY asked Aquafin to define a ‘big hairy audacious goal’ (BHAG) , in order to make the link between strategy and tactics and increase internal success rates. “That required us to think more strategically,” says Dufour. “It caused us to question whether the three things we had put forward were the right priorities if we wanted to become the reference partner for cities and towns in terms of a climate-robust environment.”

To find out exactly what the customer expected from Aquafin, Aquafin organized a series of workshops with the cities and municipalities facilitated by ACOMPANY. In an initial session, participants were encouraged to identify all needs and problems. They also indicated which ones required a solution as a priority. In a second session, based on prototyping principles, some selected ideas were further developed with the group. “After the first session, everyone was enormously motivated to participate in the workshop around solutions as well,” Dufour says of the success of these workshops. “And the second session also brought out a lot of ideas.”

From ‘inside-out’ to ‘outside-in’

These workshops with the cities and municipalities were an important turning point in the project, because the thinking was no longer based on the services that Aquafin could offer in its own ‘service catalog,’ but on the specific needs of the client. A value stream mapping exercise within this project indicated the same. The value stream mapping reduced the extensive service catalog to a simple diagram that clearly shows where Aquafin delivers value to clients. “It also allowed us to link our customers’ feedback to that value stream, which facilitated communication to other stakeholders, such as the sponsor of this project. Now I still use that diagram of the value stream to visualize and position things,” says Dufour. “By putting all of our services into a value stream, we created great clarity,” confirms Raemdonck, “both for ourselves and for the people to whom we presented our plans.

Whereas the service catalog provided an overview of the various services and internal complexity at Aquafin, the value stream provided an end-to-end view of activities to deliver a total service to cities and towns.

In this way, a project that originally aimed to add functionalities to the existing platform was transformed into a larger, broader and therefore strategic project. “This did have the consequence that we were suddenly also looking at a more strategic investment and also had to seek sponsorship a few steps higher within our organization,” says Raemdonck. “But together with ACOMPANY we had built a good business case that was approved by the client.” In addition, to gain even more acceptance by the organization, a program roadmap was delivered that took into account the enterprise roadmap in order to present a realistic scenario.

The move to a digital self-service platform obviously changes the way it works with cities and municipalities. Therefore, this project is a striking example of a business model innovation: it impacts multiple elements of Aquafin, represents a strategic response to the needs of clients, and deploys various technological components.

Close collaboration

quafin and ACOMPANY worked closely throughout the exercise. “For this whole exercise, it was important that ACOMPANY could think strategically as well as tactically. It was good that they came with a neutral perspective that took us out of our own train of thought,” says Dufour. “And at the same time, they also advised us on how to implement the project in practice.”

With this project, ACOMPANY proved once again that it has expertise for both innovation and digital transformation, combining design thinking with the elaboration of business- and enterprise architecture, so that the inside is adapted to the outside. Raemdonck also agrees: “We received very good support from ACOMPANY. They have the necessary skills and experience to understand our business, to translate that into technology, as well as knowing what it takes for an organization to get such a strategic transformation going.”