Sector(s)

Team Members

nielsaers, reszli, fmfpereira, sandboxpl, thomasdbcklr, brentmeuleman, pjonckiere

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

Rocketship distribution is contributed.

Helped test patches for Drupal core:

And other patches for contributed modules.

Pidpa is a leading water supplier in Belgium. Hundreds of employees work every day to ensure the safe distribution of drinking water and sewerage across 65 municipalities in the province of Antwerp.

About the project

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Challenge

People today are always busy and always online. They are right to expect to be able to rely on their mobile phone for organizing their daily lives. Government departments and public bodies are tapping into this trend by digitizing their touchpoints. This way, they can simultaneously adapt to the needs of their citizens and optimize the efficiency of their service delivery.

This shift had not escaped the attention of Pidpa, and that is why its team turned to Dropsolid with a legitimate demand: creating truly citizen-first digital service. In doing so, accessibility would become a focal point.

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Solution

The project was carried out in different stages to ensure fast initial delivery and on-the-go improvements and adjustments. The first step of the project consisted of the launch of a completely new website. User-centricity and findability of information were key requirements for this initial delivery.

The Dropsolid team integrated a range of existing online services, which can be expanded further at a later stage. This approach resulted in the fastest and most cost-efficient possible progress. The renewed Pidpa website provides answers to frequently asked questions in text and video formats, in an intuitive way. In addition, visitors can:

  • Pass on meter readings online,
  • File complaints and report water supply interruptions,
  • Manage all touchpoints to do with building or buying and selling property,
  • Change their contact and bank account details.

The second stage will focus on improved user-friendliness and optimization of existing service delivery. Additional services will be digitalized further on.

A small selection of stand-out technical feats that we’re particularly proud of:

  • The website is accessible to blind and partially sighted people.
  • A comprehensive (WCAG-compliant) menu with a user-editable layout.
  • User-friendly search capabilities, both in the FAQ sections and through the FAQ’s own search engine. It is powered by Apache Solr Search
  • Final approval for the Anysurfer label is pending.
  • SAP integration through the Ometa framework.
  • Advanced Google Maps integration for selecting relevant points on an online map.
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Result

The agile approach allowed Pidpa to go live with a sharply improved website in very little time. This gave the development team the opportunity to gather initial feedback about the platform’s performance, whilst enabling further prioritization of new features and functions. Efficiency optimization is key: how to shift paper processes to a fully digitized equivalent?

Pidpa’s choice of Dropsolid Experience Platform as the foundation for its online presence allows the organization to expand digital services gradually and have internal development teams take ownership of further development.

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Why Drupal was chosen

For the informational site and client portal we’ve looked at using a headless solution (Drupal and Vue.js) but the client was really looking for a flexible tool to manage and create different pages themselves. So we went for a Drupal solution featuring our Rocketship install profile. This gave us a great starting point to provide additional tools that allowed the client to completely build the site structure themselves. 

For the client portal we’ve also looked into a combination of the Symfony framework and Vue.js but again we opted for a pure Drupal solution because of the control the client wanted over all the pages of the portal and the added benefits of easily adding additional login methods in the future. (It’s me,...)

Simple examples of the control Pidpa has over the client portal: 

  • They can easily add additional text to the different online forms
  • They can easily publish/unpublish different online forms.
  • They can work easily on SEO for the client portal because they have the full capability of Rocketship at their disposal. 
  • They can easily manage users through the Drupal interfaces. 

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Because they are very stable and good parts to build on.