2 subjects - 1 partner: Mapping complex industrial and commercial electricity contracts with ENER-GX Sales and Cloud Transformation
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Energy supplier Uniper France already uses GAS-X from Sopra Steria for billing customer contracts in the French gas market. Products have to be continuously adapted to new requirements and changing regulations. Flexible accounting software like GAS-X
offers a wide range of advantages.
Uniper also wanted to benefit from these advantages in their electricity business. As a result, the multi-commodity solution ENER-GX was introduced.
The facts
- Multi-commodity supplier with large contract volume
- Country-specific characteristics of the French market
- ENER-GX for complex products: Electricity billing of industrial key accounts
- ENER-GX for simple products: Secure and efficient mapping and billing of simple contracts
Challenge
Uniper’s industrial and commercial customers have highly individual contract components. These customers make up a large part of the customer base and billing is extremely complex. The aim was to manage these extensive records more efficiently than
before. The goal was to drastically reduce the large manual effort.
The SME segment on the other hand, has a large number of mostly standardised products and contracts. Uniper required a single solution to manage standard contracts and to perform billing in a largely automatic process.
Additionally, country-specific features had to be taken into account, including billing nuclear power allocations and various municipal tax rates.
To meet these challenges, ENER-GX Sales from Sopra Steria replaced an individual Uniper solution.
Our solution
With ENER-GX APM, Sopra Steria provides an excellent integration tool for reusing or flexibly extending existing interfaces. Old systems were successfully replaced and both individual and standardised electricity contracts were migrated to ENER-GX within
a short project period. ENER-GX thus fully supports all requirements: 30-minute price time series and the ten-minute granularity customary in France for energy load profiles, capacity trading and performance optimisation of contract calculations for
municipal taxes. In addition, the solution has a specific plugin for meter reading processing for the French market in order to be able to bill future time periods for meter readings promptly.
How we worked together
Uniper and Sopra Steria have been working together for several years. Mutual understanding was a decisive factor in mastering all the challenges posed by this project. Language barriers and obstacles due to decentralised teams could be overcome with the
support of French Sopra Steria colleagues. The long communication channels with the IT service provider led to an additional project on cloud transformation. Sopra Steria will transfer the GAS-X and ENER-GX applications to the specially operated GX@Cloud
platform.
The results
With ENER-GX Sales, Uniper France uses an application with a high degree of automation and at the same time plenty of room for flexible adaptations, such as various dashboards. This enabled quality assurance and monitoring processes to be established
as central control elements.
As a result, the enormous contract volume of industrial and commercial customers can be billed efficiently and on time.
- ENER-GX for complex products: Efficient electricity billing for industrial key accounts
- Digitisation: Manual effort is minimised with ENER-GX
- Reporting for electricity and gas from one billing system
With the introduction of ENER-GX, Uniper significantly increased billing efficiency. Quality and stability has also improved. This is a clear advantage given the strong competition in the energy market.
Perspective
With the transformation of ENER-GX applications into the cloud, Sopra Steria will streamline the IT environment of the French energy supplier in a follow-up project. Uniper will benefit from synergy effects including significantly more flexibility, high
scalability and stability. In addition, processes and data are more easily accessible and new IT services can be developed faster.
The GX@Cloud is operated in the public cloud platform of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
About Uniper
Uniper is a leading international energy company with activities in more than 40 countries and around 12,000 employees worldwide. Its business is the secure provision of energy and related services. Main activities include power generation in Europe and
Russia as well as global energy trading. The energy group sold its assets in France to the Czech utility EPH in the summer of 2019.
ENER-GX gave us the tools to model and bill invoices securely, quickly and efficiently. The result was a significant boost in our performance. The successful cloud transformation laid the foundation we need to adapt flexibly to changing business requirements. Sopra Steria is our trusted partner – always constructive, efficient and reliable.
Philippe de Sédouy, Head of IT, Uniper France
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