Public utility Severn Trent is preparing to roll out enterprise resource planning (ERP) software from SAP as part of an efficiency drive designed to counterbalance recent declines in demand.

The company revealed in its financial report today that profits for the six months ending September 31 2009 rose 51% to £208.2 million. It also announced that its new, company-wide ERP implementation will go live in December.

Severn Trent has undergone a radical reorganisation of its IT department in order to better support business services, and in such a way as to serve the company’s 8 key performance indicators.

“We are investing in technology to improve key processes that enable us to work better together and improve our performance in water, waste water, customer relations and our finance, HR and procurement functions,” the company said in its annual report earlier this year. “A key element of this investment is our SAP programme and the process improvement it will deliver.”

Severn Trent is unusual in pushing through a significant ERP project this year. According to research published this month by the National Computing Centre, more than 60% of UK businesses have delayed at least some of their business application project in the past year as a result of the recession.

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