Waterbedrijf Groningen turns data into drinking water intelligence with Dynamics 365
Arie Schenk
Functional Application Manager - Waterbedrijf Groningen
juli 06, 2026
Customers
Microsoft, Ferranti, Waterbedrijven Groningen
Waterbedrijf Groningen relied on an aging AX 2012 system without a front office CRM application, resulting in limited ability to forecast demand, detect water loss, or serve customers efficiently.
The utility migrated to MECOMS 365, built on Dynamics 365 Finance and Customer Service with Power BI and Power Apps, deploying a cloud-first platform shared across Dutch water companies with partner Ferranti.
Waterbedrijf Groningen now forecasts call volumes by the hour, identifies non-revenue water loss, and empowers field staff with iPads—all on a stable platform releasing every three weeks.
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Waterbedrijf Groningen is a public drinking water utility serving every household and business across the Province of Groningen in the northern Netherlands.
Because the company had a limited ability to forecast demand or serve customers efficiently , it migrated from an on-premises IT environment to MECOMS 365, built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Customer Service with Power BI and Power Apps. With its new solution, Waterbedrijf Groningen now gives contact center representatives a unified customer view, forecasts call volumes by the hour, identifies non-revenue water loss, and empowers field staff to work more efficiently.
“With Dynamics 365 at the core of MECOMS 365, we moved to a modern cloud platform that gives our teams one trusted view of customers, operations, and dat, helping us serve our customers with greater stability, insight, and agility.” Nils van Genne, Customer Contact Manager, Waterbedrijf Groningen
Waterbedrijf Groningen is not a commercial enterprise, its mission is continuity, reliability, and excellent public service. Every household in the region has a water meter, making the utility’s operations deeply intertwined with the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
Water utilities operate in a highly regulated environment where service continuity is paramount. Billing cycles, meter readings, customer inquiries, and payment processes must run like clockwork, even during seasonal peaks.
“We are not a commercial company and quality of our service is key,” says Arie Schenk, Functional Application Manager, Waterbedrijf Groningen. “For us, the biggest achievement is stability. The customer should not notice that we changed systems.”
That stability was initially delivered in a shared SAP environment used by multiple Dutch water companies. When that cooperation ended in 2016, the utility selected MECOMS on Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, an on-premises system that served its billing and meter-to-cash needs but which faced an out-of-support underlying Microsoft platform. Bespoke customizations made maintenance costly and upgrades risky. The system offered roughly six releases per year, and each one required careful coordination.
More critically, the organization lacked a unified view of its customers. There was no CRM, no interaction history, and no way to correlate data across departments. Front-office employees worked without context, and field staff had no mobile access, every question required a call to headquarters. Reporting was manual, and audit preparation was labor-intensive.
With AX 2012 approaching end of life and the organization’s ambitions outpacing what legacy technology could deliver, Waterbedrijf Groningen made the decision to move to the cloud in a single, decisive migration.
In 2023, the company completed a comprehensive migration from AX 2012 to MECOMS 365, a cloud-based utility platform built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The entire transition, from on-premises to cloud, from no CRM to a full customer engagement layer, was performed as a single project with implementation partner Ferranti, a Belgian software development company specializing in utility solutions.
Ferranti’s standardized Water Template reduced bespoke development and aligned Waterbedrijf Groningen with a shared platform used by multiple Dutch water companies. This approach gave the utility access to industry-specific functionality: meter management, billing workflows, and customer service processes, while benefiting from a release cadence aligned with Microsoft’s own update cycle.
“Before, we had around six releases per year. Now we release every three to six weeks with Dynamics 365, in sync with Microsoft. That makes the system much more flexible. If something needs to change, it can happen quickly, and safely,” says Schenk.
The solution introduced several transformative capabilities. Power Apps now serves as the primary front-office application, giving contact center agents a single-screen view of every customer, complete with interaction history, billing details, and meter information. A dedicated app for field employees enables staff to access customer data, process meter changes, and collect payments directly from iPads, a capability that did not exist on the legacy on-premises syste.
Power BI, connected through MECOMS Synapse, became the analytics backbone. Reports now power everything from annual accountant audits to real-time forecasting of contact center demand.
With Dynamics 365 at the core, Waterbedrijf Groningen established a central, authoritative source for customer and operational data. Meter readings, billing information, payment status, and customer interactions all became accessible from a unified environment.
“All the front-office functionalities are in one application now on Dynamics 365,” says Schenk.“That makes registration easier and improves day-to-day convenience for our colleagues.”
In the contact center, employees handling up to 1,500 calls per day during peak periods now have full context at their fingertips: customer history, previous interactions, and billing status, eliminating the need to toggle between systems or chase information. With an average handling time of four minutes per call, even small efficiency gains translate into significant operational improvements.
This unified data foundation also enabled broader organizational benefits. Other internal departments: from finance to operations could rely on the same data, reducing reconciliation work and minimizing inconsistencies.
The company’s data transformation has been equally profound. Waterbedrijf Groningen can now identify non-revenue water—detecting gaps between water produced and water billed that point to leakage, meter errors, or uncontracted usage. Power BI dashboards identify these insights in ways the previous system never could, turning raw data into intelligence that protects both revenue and the region’s water supply.
“MECOMS 365 on Dynamics 365 can provide us a lot of data,” Schenk says. “We help the organization to improve processes and show them how to use that data.
The utility also can now predict call volumes based on historical patterns and meter-reading cycles, then calculate required staffing in hours rather than headcount—a precision that was previously impossible.
“We can predict how many clients are calling with the data we get in Dynamics 365,” says Nils van Genne, Customer Contact Manager, Waterbedrijf Groningen. “If I know how many calls we receive and the average handling time, I can calculate exactly how many hours of capacity we need. That makes planning much easier and more accurate.”
For field staff, iPad-based access to MECOMS data has fundamentally changed daily operations. Employees no longer need to call headquarters for customer information: they can look up accounts, process meter changes, and handle collections on-site. The result is smoother coordination between office staff and field teams, fewer delays, and a more consistent flow of information back into the system.
The stability of the platform itself has been a key benefit: the utility has experienced zero operational disruptions from change failures, and the shift from six annual releases to a three-week cadence means improvements reach users faster without compromising reliability.
“Our biggest achievement is that everything keeps running on Dynamics 365,” Schenk says. “Billing works, meter-to-cash works, customer service works. There are no major incidents, and no escalation calls.”
With a stable, cloud-first platform in place, Waterbedrijf Groningen is now looking ahead to the next wave of innovation. The organization is actively exploring AI and Copilot capabilities for its front-office operations, with a particular interest in Microsoft Digital Contact Center Platform to unify phone, chat, and digital channels into a seamless omnichannel experience.
With Ferranti continuing as a long-term innovation partner and a three-week release cadence that keeps the platform current, Waterbedrijf Groningen is positioned to adopt AI capabilities as soon as they’re ready.
“There is a lot happening around AI,” van Genne says. “But AI only works if your data foundation is solid. Now we have that foundation.”
This customer success story has also been featured by Microsoft as part of its global customer stories.
Johan Vandekerckhove
Management team
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