Overview
Legacy systems can stifle innovation and agility, posing significant challenges for large-scale operations. This was the predicament of a major international energy organisation struggling with compliance issues, data inefficiencies, and the loss of corporate knowledge as key staff left. To overcome these hurdles and drive their business forward, they looked to leverage their investment in modern data capabilities.
The Challenge
As a major global energy company that operates gas peaking power stations and solar assets, our client faced three key issues.
- Non-compliance with global IT standards
- Knowledge loss from departing staff
- Data inefficiencies
If not managed, these issues undermined the reporting needed at site and executive level. Reporting, that aimed to provide insights into financial performance, operational efficiency and environmental compliance, all of particular interest for gas peakers where coordinating the cost of gas, optimising energy sell prices during peak times, and managing emissions are critical.
The Solution
For our client, we leveraged their pre-existing investment in a modern data platform to craft a bespoke approach addressing their unique needs:
- Streamlined data intake: Establishing patterns that allowed ingestion of operational, compliance, and financial data, from both automated and manual processes.
- Comprehensive reporting: Enhancing Generation Management and Site Operations Reporting, providing line of sight from Executive Leadership to Site Management to Finance and Trading departments.
- Modern data architecture: Creating data lake objects, staged data warehouse objects, and dimensional model objects to organise and store the data accurately and allowing for introduction of future sites and assets.
- Consistent business logic: Investigating and aligning business logic across various measures, ensuring consistent and accurate reporting. Enabling cross site and asset type evaluations.
- Visualisation: Migrating legacy reports to interactive dashboards, elevating the end-user experience through improved data interpretation and data interaction.
“We’ve been able to progress work and meet compliance deadlines that we would have been unlikely to achieve if we did this work internally.”
General Manager, Technology
The Results
Getting the basics right
By leveraging the investment in their modern data platform, the solution enhanced compliance with global IT standards and mitigated the risk of knowledge loss. The transition also resolved discrepancies in business logic and data capture, improving both reporting reliability and accuracy.
The development of a reusable data model allowed for seamless extension to other sites and other asset types, enabling the business strategy of adding more renewable assets.
Driving Business Excellence
The solution supports key business drivers, including financial assurance by monitoring revenue, margins, and spending; operational excellence through tracking statistics, such as generator starts, outages, gas usage, and energy generation; sustainable development by reporting environmental statistics and emissions contributions; and regulatory compliance.
Enabling Decision-Making
The solution enables the client to make informed decisions by providing key comparisons across sites and asset types over various lifecycle stages. Continuing to allow the organisation to evaluate site viability, plan future revenue and expenses, enhance operational efficiency, and ensure environmental, regulatory, and commercial compliance. All critical decisions for large-scale operations as they transition their energy portfolio.
Where To Next?
To achieve zero harm, the next step is to enhance OH&S reporting by integrating data from various asset types, workforce types, and site types. As the strategic plan includes adding more renewable assets and increasing distributed energy resources for customers, reporting and analytics to minimise risk and protect the workforce and customers become more complex and essential.
Technologies
- aws
- Snowflake
- Power BI
- Matillion
