Wipro’s robust analytics solution simplified planning, forecasting, and optimized staff resources, resulting in GBP 60K annual savings for an electricity distribution major

Client Background

The client is a UK-based Electricity Distribution Network Operator who owns, operates and maintains UK’s North West region’s electricity distribution network, connecting 2.4 million properties, and more than 5 million people to the National Grid, with the annual revenues of over £500 million.

Industry Landscape

The game for the power & utilities sector is fast changing across business, regulatory and operational environments. Companies are faced with the paradoxical challenges of meeting increased demands against growing environmental regulations, keeping customer costs down against increasing buying power and lower switching cost, maintaining system reliability against diversifying needs.

In order to remain competitive, companies are looking at achieving sustainable advantages by investing in a range of measures aimed at ensuring lower costs, agility, and responsiveness. They are as well looking for deeper and sharper insights into their customers, markets, and operations and the macroeconomic environment. These have compelled leading companies to embrace BI for a complete process transformation.

The Opportunity

The client’s decision making and information flow for matters of network demand & generation, asset monitoring, faults tracking, fleet management, resource planning & forecasting etc. were highly localized. The data resided at the department/program/operations level. There was no reliable tool for historical comparison and trend analysis - to integrate data at all operational levels and furnish actionable insights for resource planning and forecasting.

Solution

Wipro identified the client’s key business drivers and implemented a data warehouse and reporting solution which improved the turnaround time for regulatory reporting, data analysis/trending information. The BI solution provided a centralized dashboard to drive overall productivity & improved management control in Operations, Finance, Customer Service, and Human Resources, Costs effectively. The key highlights of the engagement include:

Business Impact

• £60K annual saving

               resulting from FTE staff reductions through improved processes

• 15% reduction in overhead costs

      through automation of the estimation process, minimising manual effort

• Faster quotation turnaround times

      resulting in lower penalties being paid

• Improved customer satisfaction

      with lesser complaints through process improvement

Being an electricity distribution company, the client has to optimize CAPEX & OPEX costs related to network assets for delivering quality power supply/connections as per Guaranteed Standards of Performance (GSoP) standards under RIIO ED1 framework. The UK regulatory body - Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem), used to levy huge fines for non-conformance and non-compliance. The client needed all their information corrected, centralized and available for the nearly real-time analysis, decision making and regulatory reporting.