Wipro implements several ‘firsts’ for National Grid to deliver a world class, efficient, scalable Mobile platform of the future.

Client Background

National Grid, the customer, is UK’s largest electricity and gas utility. With transmission and distribution operations in the UK and a large presence in the regulated US market , it has an annual turnover in excess of £20 billion.

Industry Landscape

Electricity and gas utilities in the UK are currently dealing with stricter regulatory guidelines in the form of RIIO (Revenue = Incentives + Innovation + Output) introduced by Ofgem. These guidelines are aimed at creating safer, more resilient networks that meet environmental objectives and which, additionally, protect the interests of consumers by achieving operational efficiencies. In order to ensure these objectives are met and products and services are delivered at fair prices to customers, utilities need to improve the performance of their field forces.

The Opportunity

National Grid’s (NG) transmission business was using a bespoke Work Management Solution to schedule and deliver work to its 1,500 field force engineers spread across the UK. The business was at risk of losing the benefits leveraged from the bespoke solution as the cost of support was rising and a majority of the solution components were going out of support. Wipro’s Transmision Front Office (TFO) – Scheduling and Mobile (S&M) team was tasked with replacing the ageing IT solution to ensure business continued post March 2014. The project, with an implementation period of 19 months was business critical for NG. The TFO-S&M team used the opportunity to introduce IT capabilities that meet current business needs but also improved efficiencies and provided a strong platform for future growth.

Solution(Implementation)

Wipro as the lead SI delivered the SAP Mobility platform solution covering the field force of 1,500. Globally, TFO-S&M was the first to implement the SAP mobility platform (SMP3.0) with the NG Corporate App store. This allowed field force users to use consumer grade devices like iPads in an enterprise environment for a more comfortable experience.

Customer Quote

The ‘Scheduling and Mobile’ project has been one of the more complex projects implemented in Transmission at National Grid. The team adopted a business lead “One team” approach where 11 partners worked together with Wipro leading as SI. As the existing systems were coming to end of life an on-time go-live was critical. The project was delivered on time and budget. The go-live was smooth, user feedback has been positive and they find that the system is intuitive and easy to use. The project was nominated for “Team of the year” award at the UK Utilities event and won the UK SAP excellence awards for innovation

- David Salisbury (Head of Data and Business Change, National Grid, UK)