The National Institute of Safe Drinking Water and Sewerage of the Dominican Republic, INAPA, is a company that has been providing integrated management of water services for 52 years. It currently provides water service to about 800,000 families in 25 provinces of the Dominican Republic.

For more than 40 years, INAPA managed its commercial processes based on information gathered offline and then later entered into a central system for processing that ran obsolete industry software. Consequently, INAPA had to deal with operational problems, inconstant information, billing errors, delayed invoice delivery, low collection rates and even loss of income due to the lack of control in the processes.

This situation resulted in a poor customer perception of the institution and jeopardized the sustainability of the company. Faced with this state of affairs, INAPA decided to undertake a process of digital transformation with cutting-edge technology paving the way for automation and optimization of its operation, as well as improving customer satisfaction.

In 2014, as part of a modernization project financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), INAPA chose Open as its technological partner in this process and began the implementation of the Smartflex software solution for the integral management of its commercial and operational processes. With the first implementation of Open’s solution, INAPA achieved its goal of processes automation and centralization of consistent information online. This situation allowed INAPA to improve its attention times considerably, streamline revenue assurance processes, increase collections effectiveness, and to go from attending customer requests in a week and a half to managing said requests in a range of 24 to 72 hours.

In 2019, INAPA decided to continue with its technological evolution and expand the functionalities of the system to other areas of the organization. For this reason, the company undertook a project of technological updating and implemented the latest version of Smartflex. An ambitious initiative in terms of time and autonomy, since this was all being done without the permanent presence of Open’s team of consultants and engineers on site.

To achieve this, in March 2019 INAPA selected a multidisciplinary team of 23 people from all departments of the company. This team used the Open SMART implementation methodology to develop the project autonomously. The INAPA team developed a project schedule, which that went from the preparation stage to the go-live stage, and incorporated transfer of knowledge process, implementation, testing, and continuous monitoring of the operation’s performance. This way the institution was able to manage its operation with Smartflex autonomously.

Once the solution was pre-configured, the INAPA team began a digital literacy process with 327 officials of the institution in record time. The strategy employed was to go directly to each of INAP’s office locations, train the employees in their environment, give them motivational talks to break change resistance, and show them first-hand the advantages offered by the new software.

INAPA implemented the new Smartflex version in a record time of two months and one week in the 25 provinces, covering the whole operation of the company in the Dominican Republic. This project managed to integrate the business model proposed by Open with INAPA’s institutional challenges, focused on the need for technification of the processes that would facilitate the integral management of the business.

After the execution of this technological project, INAPA transformed the face of the institution with respect to the whole of the Dominican Republic. Currently, the entity carries out its operation digitally, and manages to efficiently handle requests, complaints and claims of 600,000 residential and commercial clients, that is about 2,400,000 Dominicans. Having information online has allowed INAPA to increase its revenues by 47% and increase billing by 30%, to become a sustainable and customer-centric institution.

Smartflex allows INAPA to ensure that the information of its commercial processes flows naturally and quickly between the different areas of the company, supporting end-to-end commercial processes and reducing the commercial attention times, thanks to the 360º view of the customer the solution provides. These characteristics have allowed INAPA to change its way

of working, executing an automated operation with fluid interactions between work teams and its technological tools, which optimize the management of information and business processes, generating an increase in the productivity of employees up to 97% on all fronts that have prepared INAPA for the digital transformation of its operation.