#BRA2021 | Irina Munteanu, Deputy General Manager Apa Nova: How Apa Nova perceives business excellence

Irina Munteanu, Deputy General Manager Apa Nova Bucuresti, Gold Partners of the 16th edition of the Business Review Awards Gala and award partners of the Excellence in Business category, talked to BR about how Apa Nova perceives excellence at an operational level.

Since the pandemic began, operational excellence for Apa Nova has become more critical than it has ever been – not only for performance, but for maintaining a resilient, adaptable organization. Our company’s process involved keeping the employees healthy, positive and empowered, focusing on the customers’ needs and continually improving the current activities in the workplace.

In these times of crisis, our operational excellence added speed to daily routines and value to emergency planning and preparedness. This included assessing and resolving critical capacity constraints, rapid implementation of daily management systems to ensure fast decision-making. In today’s digital world, excellence at operational level meant for our organization major investments in digitalization, which we did since 2015 and will continue to do, in order to accelerate this process.

We are talking about the digitalization of processes related to production, operations, support services, customer service and human resources management. Apa Nova is constantly looking for innovative operational technologies, from applications enabling automatic control of water treatment plants, smart metering, or online water quality monitoring to software solutions that can predict and detect losses.

For a while now, our field teams are equipped with tablets and use a digital tool to automatically take work orders and request the delivery of materials directly to their location. Communication is thus instantaneous. Digitalization remains a top priority for us and so does developing a well-defined digital ecosystem that is receptive to the current needs of the market, to help the company evolve.