Eneco

Using Process Automation to Keep Pace in a Rapidly-evolving Energy Landscape

Industry: Energy

Dutch energy provider Eneco is one of the largest players in the Netherlands and Belgium energy markets and ranks among the top 10% in the energy sector for its ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) practices. The Rotterdam-based company plans to become carbon neutral by 2035, not only in its own activities, but also in the energy it supplies to customers.

‍

Situation

Back in 2018, Eneco was becoming aware of the changes in customer needs. The margin per customer was under pressure,and ‘traditional’ energy customer contracts were declining. Old business was receding, yet the company expected to enter new market segments.One market segment Convene targeted was smart homes. It was timely decision to enter the segment because the smart home market was expected to reach almost 210 million units in Europe and grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of14.94% from 2020–2025. Eneco planned to create added value for customers and develop new energy services, like smart home applications and IoT-based energy management.One smart home device Eneco created was Soon, an intelligent thermostat that controls energy consumption and serves as the brain of a modern smart home. It comes free with a 4-year energy contract for Eneco customers; however, Soon is also sold as a standalone smart home.With so many installations and a booming market, Eneco swathe opportunity to improve its end-to-end process of selling home thermostats. This would ultimately decrease its sales cycle length and enable the company to process orders faster.

‍

Problem

Eneco was using a customized solution from ‘contact center’ to‘billing process,’ all under one large application. Once an order was placed, several processes kicked in, starting from tracking customer data for each new order (beyond the normal gas/electricity billing details), to directing external supply chain partners for the delivery of Soon thermostat.

The company later deployed MS Dynamics CRM for the billing engine, making it difficult to automatically execute customer processes. Therefore, a key challenge was to orchestrate and automate the entire process and integrate the data with Dynamics CRM.

“The first objective was to model the delivery process of the intelligent thermostat”, explains Loris DE Been, Domain Architect at Enrico's Consumer Division. “We already had a process in place, albeit a manual one, for requesting this thermostat. We wanted to automate this process and keep it internal to Eneco. We also wanted additional processes, so that the Eneco call agents could gain greater insight into the (statuses of the)orders.”

‍

Solution

Eneco chose Agile Point as its Business Process Automation(BPA) engine and a fusion team was set up consisting of developers, a process expert, a tester, and a business expert.

The team modeled Noon's order management and delivery process in Agile Point, and quickly configured the new app's integration with Dynamics CRM. The team needlepoint's visual process modelling tool to work out process changes on a digital canvas instead of scrambling with code

The newly created business process management engine simplified Eneco’s work processes while, at the same time,allowed non-users of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM to gain insight into the processes. The created order and sales management process application also simplified IT’s capability to ensure enterprise-level governance of the app through fine grained permission control at both application level as well as process level. IT further ensured that the Soon order management application had enterprise grade security controls.

Simultaneously, the overarching goal of increasing process automation and application development velocity was also achieved as process analysts and business experts were able to directly make needed changes to the application as and when needed, without compromising IT’s governance protocols.

“Based on a concrete case—the delivery of the smart thermostat— we got down to business. The first important use case to work on was the delivery of the smart thermostat”, says Paul Bummer, Technical Developer at Eneco.

“We sketched out the processes and modelled the steps. Throughclose collaboration, we reconstructed the complete deliveryprocess in the AgilePoint platform. This collaboration betweenbusiness and IT really worked. Today, it is easy for the business todetermine where errors lie or where improvements are needed. Itis not all hidden in the code—a big benefit.”