VMW is the Vlaamse Maatschappij voor Watervoorziening (Flemish Company of Water Provision). It is a government agency in charge of the study, the set-up and the exploitation of all installations needed for the provision of public water for Flanders. The company is owned by the Flemish government and has both an industrial and a commercial character. The VMW is the most important provider of drinking-water in Flanders. It owns 76 operational ground water works and 4 surface water works with a total production capacity of more than 136 million m3 per year. VMW delivers water to about 170 municipalities in Flanders through its pipes of more than 28.600 km, serving daily and continuously more than 2.5 million consumers. Besides it sells off huge volumes to other water distribution companies.

Water is a natural product, that is being pumped up from the subsoil, which means that it is depending upon the quality of the local soil. It is merely because of that dependency, that tap-water is potable water as opposed to distilled water, which is nothing more than water and oxygen. The elements determining the smell, the odour and the colour of tap-water, are being extracted from the soil.

The norms for tap-water are very stringent both on Flemish and on European level. There are no less than 61 parameters, namely physical and chemical substances, unwanted, toxic and microbiological ones and finally also smell, odour and colour. This results in tap-water being the best and most mostly checked food substance (even more than bottled water).

VMW has more than 250 different manned sites in Flanders with a total of about 1.500 people, resulting in a big complexity for the accurate distribution of its procedures. Moreover because of the nature of its activity, which can endanger daily the health of, directly and indirectly, more than 3 million people, the company is extremely dependant upon the right procedures being distributed and executed asap and everywhere within the organization. In the past the company tried to achieve this goal through a clever set-up of different paper distribution points, to communicate as fast and directly as possible with its personnel.

Today this paper nightmare has been killed by WEBISO, acting as an overall control, versioning and distribution platform for the quality management of VMW. The company constantly updates and publishes more than 2.000 procedures. And -luckily- the personnel can now consult these (and their changes!) at a mouse click and search though these, thanks to WEBISO's built-in and extensive full text searching capabilities. The ROI of WEBISO has been phenomenal for VMW: WEBISO has made VMW gain tons of paper, toner and copying money and turned valueless time of their personnel into a structural, useful and value-adding occupancy.

2004