Digital Transformation of Engie’s Utility Operations with ignio AI.ERPOps
For largest independent power producer in the world
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Schedule a DemoUncovering the business context
For a B2C enterprise which handles over 12 million consumers and growing, any problem which has a direct impact on revenue generation and customer experience, even if it is a small percentage, results in major losses. Reasons can be aplenty such as, incorrect invoicing, missed payment processing, unavailability of service delivery, human errors owing to manual operations and so on.
Energy Problems
The Challenge
The customer has over 12 million retail consumers from whom they generate over 10 million Euros of revenue per day. In this process of electricity consumer moving in, moving out, meter readings getting missed, a pool of queries coming up, inconsistent payment records and so on, were multiple issues that the customer was facing which they wanted to counter:
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01 Poor revenue realization Backlog issues such as, the end user’s account is not settled on time due to numerous reasons, resulting in loss of revenue for the customer. This amount is unrecognized and hence has a direct impact on the revenue realization.
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02 Invoicing issues Due to incorrect invoicing, consumers face major inconvenience that hampers customer experience.
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03 Dunning and payment transaction loss Inconsistent payment records result in major heartburn for the end consumer as well as attract penalties for delayed payments. To counter this, the customer must invest effort thereby increasing the operational cost.
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04 Customer life cycle management Managing customer queries required setting up a grievance cell that required manpower, infrastructure that had to be locally based and was not feasible to be outsourced hence, a higher cost.
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05 Complexity of integration Very complex integrations between CRM, Billing Engine, ETL Tools and entities such as, Distributors, Bank, Financial agencies, Print vendors, and so on, increased the de-synchronization within the cross applications resulting to Downstream impacts
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The Opportunity The aforementioned challenges for the customer had a four-fold business impact that they need to address. The high volume of consumers had a substantially large manual dependency to resolve any issues that arose, resulting in an operational impact. This had a further impact on the company reputation in case any consumer did not have the issue resolved to their satisfaction. This further cascaded into revenue impact for the customer. Moreover, there was the cross-application desynchronization impact. To counter all of this, the customer embarked upon a digital transformation journey for its B2C operation. They were looking for a solution that would enable them towards Business 4.0 and bring in Rigor in Operation (RIO).
The Solution — ignio ERPOps
With ignio AI.ERPOps, the most effective and reliable solution came out was a three-tier mitigation – Continuous Monitoring, Proactive Prevention, and Reactive Correction. Once the patterns for each problem were identified, proactive and reactive mechanisms were introduced to cater to about 90% of the impacted volume.
ignio handled six main aspects of the customer challenges:
- Mass correction and validation of meter reads
- Correction of Bill Calculation
- Streamlined Posting of Payments and Refunds
- Blocking the creation of an erroneous Invoice
- Blocking any erroneous late penalty calculation on wrong invoice amount
- Closed Loop Automation of Credit Rewards for Customer
ignio continuously monitored the operations and whenever a probable issue or risk was identified, necessary use cases were brought in as a preventive mechanism to tackle the issue. Moreover, the correction in bulk was executed through ignio automation in one go to rectify & optimize the operation.
For the customer, 51 ignio use cases – a mix of out of the box and bespoke – were deployed to counter their B2C challenges. By helping the customer address the backlogs issue, ignio helped them realize an increase in revenue, along with reduced cost of operation by eliminating customer complaints about invoicing, payments, communication and so on, thereby boosting customer retention.
ignio further extended to the customer’s CRM system through a custom CRM solution over the Database layer in the customer’s intricate infrastructure, thus enabling ignio to connect with any system regardless of the application.
Measurable Value Across Every Dimension
Locking/Unlocking solution to improve customer experience on erroneous invoices as well as false alarm on penalties.
Improved resiliency and profitability by reduction in leakage of revenue
Improved customer experience through reduced front desk queries, thereby building good reputation for the customer
