Energy & Utilities

  • Improve profit margins, resource utilization and customer satisfaction with competitive insights from your grid and customer data.
  • Provide agile services and billing models.
  • Utilize innovative IoT opportunities for new customer experience.

Our Solutions

Customer Insight

The Challenge

Utilities have a large number of customers in usually long-term relationships. They operate in a complex and changing competitive and regulatory environment, and are constantly challenged by technological innovations. Consequently, energy companies and utilities require an approach to the analysis of both structured and unstructured data to get deeper insights into customer behaviour, their service usage patterns, preferences, and interests.

Our Solution

Large amounts of data are generated by customers, smart devices at customer premises, or the operational environments of energy companies and utilities. These allow the detection of trends, identification of outliers, and live tracking of the effects of marketing campaigns. Ad-hoc customer insight facilitates efficient micro-campaigning. Social media analysis provides voice-of-the-customer insights and actionable information. Especially in combination with operational data, utilities are able to create more individual pricing models tailored specifically to the needs and behaviour of customers. This is a perfect scenario for Big Data analytics.

Relevant Solution Areas

Smart Grid

The Challenge

Traditional national energy grids employ control systems at various levels of the grid. Single generators, transformers or switches will be able to provide status monitoring and metering. Power plants have more complex control and monitoring systems to supervise the entire plant operation and electricity production. This localized principle of control makes it difficult to impossible to flexibly manage and balance between energy generation, storage and consumption, but also to detect and recover from outages and failures in the grid.

Our Solution

Smart Grids introduce IoT components to independently monitor and control all relevant components and factors in a complex energy grid. This is not limited to the energy generation and distribution process itself, but may also include the monitoring of water levels (for hydroelectric power plants), weather conditions (for solar and wind energy), or other relevant parameters. A Smart Grid will collect all relevant information in an energy data lake to then provide different views on that information repository to holistically monitor the entire value chain of an energy company. While control functions may still be limited due to security reasons or technical limitations of the targeted systems, the monitoring function and the immediate feedback on the whole range of actionable information will not only improve operations and distribution, but also open new ways of customer experience by improving the service as a whole.

Relevant Solution Areas

Contact Centers

The Challenge

Customers of utility companies typically use the standardized services subscribed to in a self-service manner, i.e., they will contact the provider only if there need to be contractual changes or if there is a problem, e.g., a service disruption. Contact centers bundle this customer front-end via e-mail, fax, phone, sms/mms and conventional mail.

Our Solution

Customer experience is determined by the efficiency and quality of this customer care. Contact center agents need a 360° view of each customer to quickly address issues, offer resolutions or point out benefits of contract upgrades. This will increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn. Contact center time is valuable, and even a 5% reduction in calls that take on average three minutes (that's an equivalent of 18 seconds saved per call) will significantly decrease contact center cost. Intelligent search techniques and Big Data platforms provide this kind of 360° dashboarding, interactive search and exploration, but also the management reporting required for business performance management and alerting for an incident management.

Relevant Solution Areas

Cybersecurity Operations Center

The Challenge

Utilities are a basic element in our daily lives, providing electricity, gas, water and services like garbage collection and recycling. Their reputation is tied to their high availability and integrity as part of national infrastructures. This needs to be protected against cyberthreats and cyberattacks from the outside and inside, but also monitored for abuses and accidential misuses. The trust customers place in utilities relies on the degree to which cybersecurity is pervasively implemented. Traditional SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) platforms are too static to hold up against sophisticated attacks and misuse patterns.

Our Solution

In contrast to SIEM systems, a full-spectrum 360° view on all relevant information from networks, devices, connections, services and applications in combination with physical security data like alarms, access control events and environmental conditions is required. Our next-generation Cybersecurity Operations Center based on Big Data analytics will provide this: finally, an intelligent platform for anomaly detection, network analysis and tailored Threat Intelligence that provides real-time views on the Cybersecurity status of an entire organization. Drill-down capabilities allow security officials to zoom into specific areas to investigate unusual activities in more detail.

Relevant Solution Areas

Smart Maintenance

The Challenge

The large number of physical buildings and structures with installations of devices, wirings and endpoints in the utilities industry creates challenges particularily for operations, fault analysis and maintenance. Active network components have an age of up to 30 years, in some cases even more, so there is also a heterogeneous vendor landscape.

Our Solution

Our Smart Maintenance solution employs Augmented Reality to provide any relevant information in the proper context. The Smart Maintenance application will draw life data streams and analytics from a data center, access maintenance documents and schedules, and deliver floor and wiring plans where available. This technology significantly reduces cost by providing all relevant information quickly and in an easy-to-use fashion right where and when it is needed.

Relevant Solution Areas