Client Case

The Saur Group:

Save money with a multi-vendor platform

The Context

For more than 80 years, Saur employees have been working to provide water in sufficient quantity and consistent quality while meeting the environmental challenges associated with their activity. Producing and supplying drinking water, treating wastewater, designing, building, maintaining and operating the facilities needed to manage the water cycle: several thousand professionals work every day to help make water a quality good accessible to all.

Energy management is a crucial issue in carrying out its activities. Historically, Saur was exclusively supplied with energy by EDF. But the opening to competition in this field has put the cards back on the table and the slightest saving can now have a big impact on overall spending.

In this context, Saur started working with new energy suppliers and had to adapt its information system to maintain automatic data integration in a transparent way for its users. The Saur group's IT department therefore naturally turned to the search for a multi-vendor platform to anticipate future changes in this market, which has become very competitive.

The Project

After a selection among several solutions on the market, Saur chose Neovacom's previous solution: "the first implementation took quite a long time, and the recipe required adjustments to allow full integration into the group's information system for both technical and financial data. The Neovacom team was competent and available to support us throughout the project.

When Saur put part of its energy contracts out to tender and selected ENGIE as its new supplier, the ISD naturally turned to Neovacom to implement a new solution. For this project, the Freedz solution, developed in the meantime, was chosen. "The project started in September 2019, everything was simpler and faster, we were able to capitalize on the previous project" explains Philippe Bovagnet. Moreover, "Engie was already one of the suppliers available on Freedz, so the operation was totally transparent for us".

This project was very important for Saur: "We had set a strict and unchangeable deadline, driven by contractual objectives with Neovacom and ENGIE. The teams, available and involved, made it possible to meet these commitments".

Profits received

The benefits of this project are important for Saur: "We now benefit from a platform for collecting invoices that allows us to easily change suppliers, without the technical part being a hindrance and therefore indirectly to participate in the savings linked to this competition".

"In addition, the supplier for whom this project was designed was already connected to Freedz for other customers. Its implementation was transparent for us, which allowed a very fast deployment of the solution.

The Saur Group in brief :