Challenge

An Australian energy-distribution company wanted to become more customer-centric across its organization and provide a superior customer experience. Achieving this required migrating business processes to a cloud-based infrastructure, a strategic decision that would consolidate data from disparate third-party vendors, enable the company to gain valuable insights by breaking down data silos, and improve operational efficiencies. This transformation would also minimize delayed and potentially erroneous communications to customers regarding outage and financial reconciliations.

Solution

Wipro’s solution was built to enable a consolidated view of energy customers and simplify operations management for the brand’s customer business teams. This was achieved by adopting an industry-leading, new-age SAP IS-U platform on S/4HANA using Azure cloud, which entailed extensive data migration. Wipro developed and executed an end-to-end strategy for migrating and consolidating two years of historical data from four different source systems comanaged by the energy leader and a third-party IT partner. Upfront data profiling helped identify data gaps early and improved business process efficiency, allowing manual cleansing activities to be planned on a monthly basis for 100-plus business rules. An automated data remediation using rule-based cleansing resulted in increased throughput, especially for high-volume data scenarios. The automated migration resulted in a 99.99% success rate, and a Wipro solution built on SAP Business Object Data Services (BODS) and EMIGALL enabled a minimized error rate. 

Benefits

With the migration and consolidation complete, the Australian company gained a unified view of its consumers’ data to better serve their needs. By retiring its legacy system, the energy distributor dramatically simplified its customer and billing business processes with minimal disruptions. Its omnichannel customer experiences were enhanced with timely, data-driven customer communications, and no time was wasted on correcting or reconciling data that’s critical to managing outage notifications to customers. The organization also saw a reduction in the total cost of ownership of its IT infrastructure for the migrated legacy applications related to customer, billing, and revenue management operations. Migrating right the first time led to further financial benefits, saving the enterprise approximately AUD$3 million (on average). This was mainly based on avoiding 5% of billing and revenue exceptions that typically occurred in legacy applications attributed to 50,000 National Metering Identifiers (NMIs). The successful data migration of these NMIs to a new-age platform resulted in savings of approximately 25,000 person-hours of effort.