Client

British energy retailer supplying electricity and gas to millions of residential and business customers

Business objective

Various multilateral agreements govern the exchange of operational and customer-related data amongst market participants in the deregulated British electricity and gas markets. For example, a customer registration or deregistration event triggers extensive data exchange amongst the relevant retailers, network operators, data aggregation agencies, metering companies, and others.  

As one of the largest retailers in the market, the client has to manage large volumes of market data flows effectively and flexibly. They had managed so far using various legacy products but experienced critical challenges. Exception management processes were ineffective, and the complexity of the systems and interfaces caused inefficiencies in enabling new requirements. Our client needed new capabilities and a consolidated platform to manage industry data flows.

How Wipro delivered client success 

Wipro started with a discovery phase that identified the current and future priorities of business stakeholders and analyzed the existing messaging architecture.

We also inventoried dataflow types and volumetrics from backup logs and database archives, using specially developed scripts and tools. This analysis revealed 25 impacted software applications, 200+ different dataflow types, and nearly 12,000 daily data transfers.

As a second step, Wipro conducted a detailed gap analysis between the current and target capabilities.  We used this analysis and the outputs of the discovery phase to guide the development of the target solution architecture and a risk-mitigated transition path to achieve the target state. We applied several key principles in developing the architecture. One of these was the decision to not make any customizations to Marketflow, the third-party product underlying the proposed solution. We proposed developing adapters using technologies that were already available in the client’s IT landscape to address any product limitations vis-à-vis our client’s requirements. Changes to regulations and market coordination arrangements are frequent in the country’s dynamic energy market. Hence, another key principle we adopted was to ensure a high degree of flexibility and configurability of the target architecture.

Agile and lean development approaches, coupled with test automation, enabled smooth project execution and implementation. For example, Wipro developed a testing tool to generate test data flows and test execution reports. Using this tool, QA users were able to test and analyze about 10,000 files within minutes.

The Impact

• Accurate data has eliminated regulatory penalties
• User empowerment to modify or add data flows with minimal IT support
• 15% Savings in software licensing and opex costs
• Enabled client to introduce new requirements rapidly
• Zero-touch application support by auto-monitoring data flows
• 35% Reduction in user support needs