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Swiss Energy Company CKW Turns to AgilePoint to Modernize Service Delivery and Legacy Processes

Industry: Energy & Utilities

CKW Group, a 127-year-old Swiss energy company, is the leading energy services provider in Central Switzerland,supplying electricity to more than 200,000 residential, commercial, utility, and municipal customers in the cantons of Lerner, Schwarz and Uri.

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Situation

CKW Group’s major shareholder, Expo Group, is Switzerland's largest producer of renewable energy and an international leader in energy trading. As a major shareholder of 81%, Axpo Group encouraged CKW to modernize their-legacy processes to reduce customer service costs currently-exceeding the industry average. This would ultimately improve the overall service delivery experience as well.The first process selected for automation was a service request process as it affected many external stakeholders such as building firms, architects, electricians, and independent inspectors who interacted with CKW through an external customer portal.

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Challenges

To serve the need of various customer groups, CKW was managing 100 s of business processes (both internal and external-facing). A few of them based on manual data collection from an internal portal, and other based on email data. The manual process involved transferring data from the external portal to a separate, internal tool so that staff could work on the case.

The existing half-automated, half-manual processes lacked in process visibility, approval mechanisms, and did not show dependencies for long running processes such as applications for new connection requests by commercial and municipal customers, temporary power supply requests, or an existing customer requesting to install a solar power generation system.

In case of complex processes like power lines maintenance,grid extensions, and transformer upkeep, the process efficiency was even more dismal. Existing workflows often resulted in countless requests and huge data volumes with the need to manually transfer data to a different system, and sometimes duplicated in both systems simultaneously causing version control issues

CKW identified the shortcomings in the current system which prevented the staff from promptly and efficiently working eon cases.

As a result, CKW needed a way to cater to an ever-growing need of an automated way to process service requests while leveraging existing investments and reuse existing app components without having to build each new app from scratch.

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Solution

After a comprehensive vendor selection exercise consisting of technical analysis, product overview workshops, and proof-of concept building, CKW chose Agile Point as its business process automation (BPA) platform.

AgilePoint closely worked with CKW employees to help build centralized portal for staff and customers that is user-friendly,fast, and transparent due to standardized processes. The tea mat CKW alliteratively developed the desired architecture for form based application development. AgilePoint was also used to interconnect the various systems, information, and tasks for internal and external portal users. In addition, citizen developers, aka non-technical business users, could directly make changes to the process model and have that reflect as change in the overall process application.

The AgilePoint-based process automation and application development architecture complied with all technical requirements and the life cycle of the business processes that CKW’s technical team desired.

CKW was able to set up two centralized portals, one for internal users and the other for customers when they initiated service requested. The workflow engine, 15+ process patterns, 80+ form controls, and open interfaces provided CKW the flexibility and performance it needed to automate end-to-end processes on a single platform. The team was also able to take parts of the solution and reuse them across other apps/workflows it needed to automate.

For very complex, recurring solution building blocks, CKWquickly and securely developed extensions for AgilePoint usingVisual Studio project templates.

The resulting applications were accessible to end-users via Microsoft SharePoint as a single point of entry through the AgilePoint portal and allowed for visibility to vary according to role requirements.