Finance & Corporate Services
“Finance and Corporate Services Division includes a range of business, financial, accounting, IT, Human Resource, procurement and other specialists whose aim is to build a strong customer service focus in providing our support services to the business.”
Sharon Smith
General Manager Finance & Corporate Services
Finance & Corporate Services is often referred to as the “shared services” division and has a team of business service professionals providing people, financial, commercial and technology related services to support Hunter Water business.
Finance
This team undertakes all the Corporate and external reporting for Management, the Board, Regulators and other stakeholders. They provide liability and cashflow management to ensure we have the funds to operate. Finance co-ordinates the Corporate budgeting process and provides help to other business areas for managing both their operating and capital budgets.
Key projects in the next 12 months:
• to further refine and document our reporting systems to provide easier reporting tools for all areas of the business.
• funding and managing the cashflows to support the major capital program over the next 5 years.
• review of Hunter Water’s business activities to further develop our pricing strategies in line with the emerging competitive environment.
Corporate Services
The team has a number of activities:-
• Procurement - provides a range of purchasing services from head office stationery to managing major supply contracts including the fleet, energy, chemicals, telephones, and pipes and fittings, etc.
• Corporate Records Management - including the electronic document management system (EDMS) and the information library which provides an extensive base of research particularly for our engineering staff.
• Property - provides portfolio management including facilities management of Head Office and other offices and depots as well as the extensive property that our infrastructure assets are placed on.
• Legal risk and insurance requirements for the organisation are also handled by this team.
Key projects in this area over the next 12 months include:
• the introduction of online authorisations for procurement. This follows on from the successful introduction of Pcards in March 2007.
• further roll out of the electronic documents system (EDMS).
• further centralisation of procurement including development of specialist procurement/project management expertise to further enhance our strategic purchasing capability.
• in April 2007 the Corporation outsourced its vehicle fleet to Fleet Australia as an initiative to help provide a better fleet service to the business.
Information & Communication Technology Services (ICT)
This group provides a range of technology and communication solutions to support Hunter Water’s business systems. ICT put in place the technology, architecture and processes which allow all our business activities to operate. These include desktop services to over 400 PC’s and mobile technologies and our financial business systems such as Ellipse, the new customer information billing system, CIS, our SCADA network which helps monitor and control the water and wastewater services throughout the region.
The ICT team has two data centres – one at head office and one off-site to provide backup for these key systems.
ICT are working on a range of areas:
• Introduction of a new Service Management System or Help Desk which commenced in May 2007. This will allow better logging, monitoring and reporting of IT services so that we can further assist in the development of new systems, training or process improvement.
• A new strategic plan was recently finalised with the help of a range of people across the business. This sets the broad directions for future ICT development and includes:
o Wireless enabling of field staff so they can undertake their maintenance and other field activities with information provided remotely.
o Enhanced integration between the major Corporate Systems including Ellipse, Customer Information System, Assets & Operations Maintenance System, etc
o Strengthening of security and other business continuity measures.
o Customer self service via the internet. A number of business areas are planning to provide this service to our customers.
Human Resources (HR)
Hunter Water has a small team of HR professionals who undertake a range of recruitment, training and development, employee relations, payroll and importantly occupation health and safety related activities. The HR team has been focused in the last couple of years on building a range of Human Resource systems and processes as the platform for driving our people management and cultural change program. This has included leadership and management development programs to support building leadership capabilities across the business and strengthening of our safety processes which has resulted in an outstanding reduction in our injury rate.
The team has driven a cultural review program and introduced the “Blue Zone”, as a blue culture strategy. This includes a number of activities that most staff would have or will participate in including:
• State of the nation addresses by the Managing Director.
• Briefing sessions on our cultural strategy.
• Participation in cultural surveys.
• Sapphire sessions where we workshop key constructive behaviours.
The HR team has also moved to automate a range of employee related activities including online leave applications, etc. This is all part of a plan to provide further employee self service capability into the future.