Business Collaboration platform for utilities industry

Peter Van Kerkhove Managing Partner

Agenda

• About Essent• About Cnext• Dynamo - Project Goals• Business Collaboration Solution• Approach• Lessons Learned• Questions?

About Essent

Wie is Essent?

• Sinds oktober 2009 onderdeel van RWE, een energiereus in de top 5 van Europa

• Onder de naam Essent activiteiten in Nederland, België en Duitsland• 2,6 miljoen huishoudelijke en zakelijke klanten voor gas, elektriciteit,

warmte en energiediensten• Meer dan 90 jaar ervaring in productie, handel, transport en levering van

elektriciteit

• Koploper duurzame energie in Nederland voor productie en levering: 40 % van alle duurzame productie in Nederland komt van Essent (20 % hiervan is windenergie, 80 % is biomassa)

• Essent stopt meer energie in energie: betaalbaar, betrouwbaar en duurzaam

De betrouwbaarheid, competentie en reputatie van Essent, het grootste energiebedrijf in Nederland, een grote speler in NW-Europa.

Wie is Essent Belgium? Een sterke en vernieuwende energieleverancier in België,

die investeert in duurzame energie.

• Essent levert 100% groene elektriciteit• Meer dan 220.000 klanten in België

• Exploitatievergunning in de 3 gewesten• Elektriciteit en gas• Alle klantensegmenten: van particulieren tot

zakelijke klanten• Standaardleverancier voor Waver, Limal &

Bièrges (WaLiBi)

• 125 wns met hoofdzetel te Antwerpen

About Cnext

Helping organizations to achieve their strategic goals by aligning people and business processes with state of the art technology solutions.

Collaborate

IntegrateCommuni

cateInteract

With

- Cnext , Our Offering

Services

Solutions

Innovations• Project

management

• Consulting

• Outsourcing

• Training

• Strategy and planning

• Research and development

• Cloud computing

• Business collaboration and integration with

• Business communication and interaction

“Extend beyond

capabilities”

“Choose to be

effective”

“Reach beyond

tomorrow” Visit our website for more details on www.cnext.eu

Dynamo Project Goals

About Dynamo (kick off 2009):

“Re-Engineer ALL B2C (Business to Consumer) business processes”

Project Goals:• Reduce the risk of non compliance to new legislation in our industry(MIG4, SEPA)• Lower the maintenance cost (cost-to serve)• Improve data quality• Replace the current ERP (end of life)• Deliver transparancy on the Business Process execution, and enhance user experience

- Dynamo Project Goals

Document Management - Business Critical functionality:

Documents (invoices, letters, …) sent by postal services are playing a very important role in managing the relationship/communication between Essent and their customers.The document’s ‘outbound channel’ is thus regarded as a very important channel within customer care and has impact on direct costs and perceived image/ customer experience.

- Document Management Project Challenges

1. How to extend ERP business processes beyond (enterprise) boundaries?

2. How to ‘integrate’ our existing applications into Axapta (eg customer onboarding)

4. How to secure the communication with our external partners (debts collection, sales, ..)

3. What’s the best solution to turn ERP data into printed documents (invoices?)

3. We need a flexible platform to setup and maintain business collaborationwith our external partners. (agility)

IT challengesBusiness challenges

1. Outbound document batches to our customers need to be processed within hours....

One of the key focus area's in utility sector is to find the right balance between(1)controlling costs related to service delivery (= providing energy to the customer), while (2) investing in delivering excellent customer care experience to Essent’s customers

2. Transparancy on execution of core business processes (amongst the billing run ( ‘One version of the truth’)

“We need a flexible, and cost efficient solution

to support our E-Business strategy”

“Electronic business methods enable companies to link their internal and external data processing systems more efficiently and flexibly, to work more closely with suppliers and partners, and to better satisfy the needs and expectations of their customers”

Source: Wikipedia

Most important requirements for a solution supporting Essent’s E-Business Strategy

- E-Business - requirements

- Generic (modular) platform, ‘pluggable’ into the existing infrastructure at Essent, build using .NET SOA principles.

- Enterprise ready and scalable platform, should support Essent’s growth

- End to End transparency on process execution (BAM – Business Activity Monitoring)

- ‘Future proof’ platform: Must be easy to set-up additional e-business channels.

- Cost effictive, build upon existing investments made in technology stack (like XSL-FO, MS BizTalk, ...)

Essent has chosen to support their E-business strategy by implementing a Business Collaboration Platform, based on MS BizTalk Server 2009.

This allows Essent to become a more agile organization, supporting their initiative to optimize Essent’s B2C (Business to Consumer) business processes, and as a result respond faster to (market) changes.

Business Collaboration Solution

Contact Center

Printing/Mailing

Business Partners Channel(debts collection, Sales, ...)

‘Secured‘ Internet (AS2, ...)

<XML/>

Document Management Services

<XSL-FO/>

BizTalk as orchestration engine for Document Generation

Orchestration engine for Document Generation:

Document Management Services

Contact Center

Cust

omer

s

Customer Interaction Channels (inbound)

<XML/>

Customer Interaction Channels (outbound)

Print & mail

Fax

Email

BizTalk as Customer Interaction Channels connector

Email

Fax

Letters

(demat +OCR)

Website

<XML/>

All documents towards consumers and business partners are ‘handled’ by a specialized business partner.The automation process is implemented and governed by BizTalk server

oEnd to End Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) – including delivery notification by ‘De Post’oHigh Volume Document generation

- Capabilities

Business Process Outsourcing (Printing and mailing // CallCenter operations):

Benefits:Reduce cost to handle invoicesReduce errors during billing runsReduce cost for postal servicesEnhance visibility transparency on the FULL process cycle

Technologies involvedo PDF generation Engine

(XSL-FO and .NET based – the fastest on the market)

o WCF o BizTalk Servero SQL Servero AS2 secured communication

• Interfacing between all major internal systems are managed by BizTalk Server,MS Dynamics ERP, Essent Public website, Partner interfaces, …

• SOA interface on top of Essent’s core document management System (docbase)• Core processes are exposed/consumed by BizTalk Server

SOA platform for Business Collaboration (EAI & B2B)

Benefits:• Future ready – scalable platform• Centralized and managed integration

platform• Near-real time visibility/reporting

towards the business users (KPI’s exposed through BAM)

Technologies involvedo WCF o SQL & ORACLE LOB adaptero BizTalk Servero SQL Server o Axapta AIF adapter for BizTalko SFTP adapter

- Capabilities

Approach

-Started with a Proof of Concept- Target: challange high volume, low latency and high performant

document rendering solution, based on BizTalk Server(batch (asynch) and real-time (synch) processing in 1 platform

- Implementation:- A lot of testing !

- Business critical- Image, quality and cost to serve are highly dependant on success

of the overall solution- (manual validation of all documents generated)

- Go live 29 March 2010 very succesfull

Lessons Learned

1) Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) of large BizTalk solutions is not a trivial task• large amount of ‘environments’ • huge pressure to deliver deployments on a DAILY basis

Requires:Þ Requires maturity of the implementation team (procedures) Þ Some ‘tweaking’ using additional tools and automated deployment Scripts needed

- Delivered this feedback to the MS BizTalk product team, - ALM is a major topic for enhancements for the next releases of BizTalk.

2) Performance and low latency requirements: • architecture very important• do not re-invent the wheel (look for existing patterns)

Lessons Learned

IT challengesBusiness challenges

1. How to extend ERP business processes beyond (enterprise) boundaries?

2. How to ‘integrate’ our existing applications into Axapta (eg customer onboarding)

4. How to secure the communication with our external partners (debts collection, sales, ..)

3. What’s the best solution to turn ERP data into printed documents (invoices?)

3. We need a flexible platform to setup and maintain business collaboration with our external partners. (agility)

1. Outbound document batches to our custumers need to be processed within hours....

2. Transparancy on execution of core business processes (amongst the billing run ( ‘One version of the truth’)

Questions?