About
Alinta Energy
Alinta Energy is one of Australia’s largest suppliers of gas and electricity, serving over one million customers and employing over 800 people across Australia and New Zealand. Alinta Energy owns and operates power stations across Australian and New Zealand, and operates distribution infrastructure across Australia, delivering 3,000MW of power to Australian homes and businesses.
Alinta Energy plays a major part in developing a sustainable energy future for Australia, underwriting or investing directly in 1,500MW of large scalable renewables by 2025, including solar, storage and wind technologies.
Overview
Working with Alinta Energy’s Trading & Portfolio Management team, Ignite designed and delivered a solution to migrate business reports to a central Power BI platform on Alinta’s Data Hub (ADH), powered by Microsoft Azure and Databricks.
This solution was devised to minimise single person risk (through data being housed in individual’s Excel spreadsheets) and to further leverage Alinta’s strategic investment in its Data Hub as it moved into the second phase of development with its key strategic platform.
The Challenge
Alinta’s existing trading and portfolio management reporting was the result of years of ongoing development of tactical solutions when required by the business. As a result, many of the key data processes were being run by individuals in their own unique files, with manual uploads and refreshes.
This presented issues to the business, like:
- Single person risk – only one person or a few people knowing how to run a specific process or where it is located.
- Accuracy impact – as updates and refreshes were manual and required manual intervention to change.
- Hardcoding and code complexity – whenever a change was required.
- Business definitions and mapping documentation were not available for every process.
The Solution
The team transferred the legacy Excel reports into an end-user focused tool housed on ADH. This included complete documentation with business definitions, data element sources, a complete product canvas and reporting wireframes.
“This enables us to free up our analysts and traders to spend more time thinking about strategy and ways to add more value to the business,” says Buzby Kuramoto, GM Enterprise Solutions Delivery at Alinta Energy.
Adding new data ingestions, Ignite enabled a business ready data model that was available for ‘self-serve’ by users within the business.
Build data products to realise repeatable and sustainable business value from data.
- Data Driven Apps
- Customised User Dashboards
- Customised Business Intelligence Reports
- Recommendation Engines
- Measure asset utilisation
- Built-in Artificial Intelligence
The Results
Alinta now has a fully automated solution for NEM Generation reporting, saving time in manual intervention and operational overheads. The data model is now reusable so that business users can ‘self-serve’ as required and not be reliant upon an individual’s availability to complete tasks. The data can be aggregated at different frequencies (monthly, quarterly, and yearly) where previously 80% of the affected reports were only available monthly.
The Databricks and Microsoft Azure solution is blisteringly fast. Using Alinta’s Data Hub, queries that previously had taken 6 hours now take only 5 minutes. And business daily reports are now available every morning before 8:30am, enabling business users and analysts to start their work earlier and have more time to develop strategic insights, instead of having to gather data and information.
6hrs > 5min
Query times in Alinta Data Hub cut from 6 hours to mere minutes to perform.
Daily reports available by 8.30am, every morning.
100% Reporting Access
Previously 80% of affected reports only available monthly. Data aggregation now possible at monthly, quarterly and yearly frequencies.
“There was a great deal of manual transfers of data between reports and systems. Automating these processes enables faster decision making and removes manual and repetitive effort away from highly skilled people. The business is very happy with the results and are looking at ways to continue to evolve the systemisation of spreadsheet models to realise even more benefits,” adds Buzby.
“In a highly competitive market for talent, especially when it comes to energy analysts and traders, we feel it is important to remove as much repetitive, manual effort as we can – we want to maximise the time they have to think strategically and innovate. There is huge business benefit in this, and at the same time we are alleviating key person risk.”
Cindy has been great as a delivery lead, ensuring that everyone is across everything – really the whole team was fantastic in the way that they engaged with Alinta technology and business stakeholders, and their process of constantly evaluating their performance and identifying improvements for the next engagement is the most comprehensive I have seen yet.
Where To Next?
As part of this project, the Alinta team and Ignite identified a range of other workbooks to bring across to the platform. Through aligning business decision making tools with the ADH platform, Alinta can continue to reduce risk, define requirements for additional data model expansion and minimise end user change management. The prioritised list has been identified and the team will start working on these workbook uplifts as they continue to build out the ADH platform.
“The traders are now driving the escalation of the number of reports that we move into the Power BI environment. We will do some internally and others that we may need some further help on. There’s plenty of opportunity to realise further value.”
Technologies
- Azure
- Power BI
- databricks
