Bridging IT and OT with a single system of record

Delivering safe drinking water isn’t just an essential service for Yarra Valley Water (YVW), it’s a profound community commitment to 2 million people and businesses in Melbourne, Australia.

To fulfill its mission across a 20,000-kilometer utility network, YVW requires a seamless blend of environmental stewardship and a robust IoT platform to keep water and sewer mains running smoothly across many sites. Powering this critical operation is a dedicated Operational Technology (OT) team, which is tasked with managing thousands of OT assets—from batteries and modems to controllers and sensors.

Service requests previously arrived as emails, chats, and walk-ups, making it difficult to track, forecast, or coordinate OT work for each site. The team often assigned multiple technicians to the same site for entirely different tickets, creating unnecessary travel time and risking coding errors.

With ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) already embedded in IT operations, YVW saw the advantage of gaining the same visibility into OT incidents as it has for IT, allowing staff to quickly identify root causes of issues before they become showstoppers.

“We provide essential clean water and sanitization services to our customers across the Yarra network,” says Kowsikaraman (Raman) Pattabiraman, Head of Operational Technology at Yarra Valley Water. “With that, we needed a single platform to see and manage our OT assets, requests, projects, and incidents more efficiently.”

Partnering with ServiceNow Partner Sysintegra, YVW integrated ServiceNow Operational Technology Management with ITSM. The results: real-time visibility into IT and OT incidents at each site, enabling faster resource prioritization and preventative action to maximize uptime.

“We already use the ServiceNow AI Platform across the business. When we reviewed our asset management and work management technology, ServiceNow was the clear choice because of its out-of-the-box capabilities, delivering faster time to value,” Raman explains. 

Batching site visits cuts travel time and coordination effort

As one of Melbourne’s largest water corporations, with AUD6.6 billion worth of assets across the utility network, faced resource challenge due to legacy disparate information.

“We had limited visibility in knowing what kind of requests we received, the condition of OT assets and which site they are in, and what work need to be done,” Raman explains.

By using OT Service Management, Raman’s team now sees the complete picture: incident type, volume, and OT asset location across all the sites. This makes it easy to identify and batch work for a specific site and send one technician to handle multiple tasks in a single trip.  

“When you’re managing OT assets across many sites, that visibility must help you decide what to do next. With ServiceNow, we can see the assets, incidents, and work associated with each site, then coordinate visits more efficiently. That has helped us to improve resource utilization by 50%.,” Raman explains.  “With less travel time, our team can focus on the quality of the work we are doing than keeping up,” Raman explains

If a critical failure occurs, the OT team can review historical changes at a specific site, allowing it to instantly trace the cause instead of reconstructing timelines through multiple staff and contractors.

Having visibility into OT work and audit trail, ServiceNow helps YVW to stay compliant and respond faster to evolving and complex regulatory environment.

“From project governance perspective, ServiceNow gives us a rigorous process to measure effort and maintain appropriate support across project phases,” Raman explains.

A connected OT asset platform supports growth toward almost 1 million IoT devices

With site-level coordination solved, YVW turned to a bigger challenge: proving the foundation could scale.  Using ServiceNow OT Visibility, YVW automated the mapping of OT assets into the ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB). The OT team now tracks inventory status and maintenance work across sites in one platform

“With an end-to-end mapped view of OT assets, we can better manage asset lifecycle and associated risks, something that wasn’t possible before.”

By integrating ServiceNow with other cybersecurity and asset management tools, and feeding the data into CMDB, YVW has become more proactive in tracking and responding to cyber threats.  The next step is to add ServiceNow Exposure Management to further reduce remediation time.

YVW currently operates thousands of industrial controllers and plans to install approximately 900,000 digital meters by 2032. ServiceNow OT focused offerings give the team a scalable foundation to optimize resources and support this growth, resolving OT incident proactively and coordinating changes as the network expands.  

Site-specific OT platform rollouts in around two months

With Sysintegra’s support, YVW built a site-ID based platform linking OT incidents, requests, and changes to specific locations using ServiceNow. The water utility company completed the implementation in just 10 weeks.

“Our key learning is to start simple, execute well, and mature over time,” Raman advises. “Sysintegra kept us aligned across architecture, technology and security. They challenged our thinking and applied real-world problem solving skills to deliver the solutions. That partnership and agility is what got us to go-live in such a short timeframe."

As the OT platform evolves, YVW will further strengthen compliance and measure automation scope for OT work across the networks. The team is also exploring how AI can help to identify opportunities for continuous improvement in process and quality of work.

“OT works at heart of our business. We’ve set a high bar for work quality,” Raman reflects. “ServiceNow gives us the agility and scalability to work smarter and deliver safe, better services to the community.”