Energy markets all around the world are going through a significant change and transformation, creating ample opportunities along with significant challenges. As is the case in any industry, opportunities are attracting more players in the marketplace, increasing the competition, and reducing the tolerances for less-than-optimal business decision making. Success requires creating and disseminating accurate and timely information to whomever and whenever it is needed. For instance, if you need to easily track marketing budgets, balance employee workloads, and target customers with tailored marketing messages, you would need three different reporting solutions. Electrabel GDF SUEZ is doing all of that for its marketing and sales business unit with SAS® Visual Analytics platform. The one-solution approach is a great time-saver for marketing professionals in an industry that is undergoing tremendous change. “It is a huge challenge to stabilize our market position in the energy market. That includes volume, prices, and margins for both retail and business customers,” notes Danny Noppe, Reporting Architecture and Development Manager in the Electrabel Marketing and Sales business unit. The company is the largest supplier of electricity in Belgium and the largest producer of electricity for Belgium and the Netherlands. Noppe says it is critical that Electrabel increase the efficiency of its customer communications as it explores new digital channels and develops new energy-related services. “The better we know the customer, the better our likelihood of success,” he says. “That is why we combine information from various sources— phone traffic with the customer, online questions, text messages, and mail campaigns. This enhanced knowledge of our customer and prospect base will be an additional advantage within our competitive market.” One Version of the Truth Electrabel was using various platforms and tools for reporting purposes. This sometimes led to ambiguity in the reported figures. The utility also had performance issues in processing large data volumes. SAS Visual Analytics with in-memory technology removes the ambiguity and the performance issues. “We have the autonomy and flexibility to respond to the need for customer insight and data visualization internally,” Noppe says. “After all, fast reporting is an essential requirement for action-oriented departments such as sales and marketing.” Working More Efficiently at a Lower Cost SAS Visual Analytics automates the process of updating information in reports. Instead of building a report that is out of date by the time it is completed, the data is refreshed for all the reports once a week and is available on dashboards. In deploying the solution, Electrabel chose a phased approach starting with simple reports and moving on to more complex ones. The first report took a few weeks to build, and the rest came quickly. The successes include the following: • Data that took 2 days to prepare now takes only 2 hours. • Clear graphic insight into the invoicing and composition of invoices for B2B customers. • A workload management report by the operational teams. Managers can evaluate team workloads on a weekly or long-term basis and can make adjustments accordingly. “We have significantly improved our efficiency and can deliver quality data and reports more frequently, and at a significantly lower cost,” says Noppe. And if the company needs to combine data from multiple sources, the process is equally easy. “Building visual reports, based on these data marts, can be achieved in a few days, or even a few hours.” Noppe says the company plans to continue broadening its insight into the digital behavior of its customers, combining data from Web analytics, e-mail, and social media with data from back-end systems. “Eventually, we want to replace all laborintensive reporting with SAS Visual Analytics,” he says, adding that the flexibility of SAS Visual Analytics is critical for his department. “This will give us more time to tackle other challenges. We also want to make this tool available on our mobile devices. This will allow our account managers to use up-to-date, insightful, and adaptable reports when visiting customers. “We’ve got a future-oriented reporting platform to do all we need.”
Questions for Discussion
1. Why do you think energy supply companies are among the prime users of information visualization tools?
2. How did Electrabel use information visualization for the single version of the truth?
3. What were their challenges, the proposed solution, and the obtained results?