EDF migrates to the cloud to pave way for future growth
TCS works with one of the UK’s largest electricity providers to modernise IT infrastructure for its business solutions and achieve total cost transparency.
Industry
Energy, Resources & Utilities
Rebalance the energy equation
Solution
Data and Analytics
Smart Data for AI: Building Agile, AI-ready Ecosystems
Highlights
- As its on-premise infrastructure was nearing end-of-life, EDF—one of the largest power providers to UK businesses—was looking for a flexible, scalable and future-ready platform.
- EDF Business Solutions (EBS) worked with TCS to modernise its IT infrastructure and drive an ambitious, complex, and technology-led business transformation. .
- TCS proposed a single-phase migration of the company’s customer base to the new platform—an Oracle C2M hosted on AWS cloud—which was designed to minimise risks. The approach saved EDF more than GBP 3 million (USD 3.8 million) in a year in potential additional project costs.
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Overview
EDF is Britain’s biggest generator of zero-carbon electricity, meeting one-fifth of the country’s demand and supplying electricity and gas to millions of customers.
The company is helping customers realize their net zero goals with innovative energy solutions and enabling its customers—both in enterprise and retail—to take their first step toward living sustainably.
EDF, one of the largest power providers to UK businesses, aims to help British businesses and the public sector to realise their net zero goals. EDF Business Solutions (EBS) provides electricity, metering services, and power purchase agreements (PPA) to industrial and commercial (I&C) organisations and is the UK's leading electricity and PPA provider.
Challenges
Most of the global greenhouse gas emissions come from energy generation and consumption by commercial buildings.
The responsibility on the industrial and commercial (I&C) sector to decarbonise at a fast pace to meet the net-zero target by 2050 is enormous. This is creating a market that is quickly evolving with new green energy technologies, new products and services, new business models, and a different energy mix for the I&C customers. To realise its full potential in a highly competitive market, EBS required a platform that is flexible, scalable, and ready for the future.
In 2019, EDF’s on-premise infrastructure was nearing end-of-life. The existing IT framework was running on an old platform of Oracle Utilities, connected to a myriad of downstream systems. Due to its high technical debt and zero ability to scale, the existing technology platform lacked the flexibility to meet the rising business demand and the company’s growth goals.
Other factors driving the need for modernisation included:
- The lead-to-quote conversion was not effective for customers who had complex multi-site arrangements.
- The monthly billing process was constrained by system capacity, limiting the number of bills that could be generated in a single day.
- There was a lack of synchronization between meter data management and the billing system.
The combined effect of technical debt, low adoption of digital technologies and the lack of automation added risk to business operations while limiting growth. EBS needed to move away from aging on-premise infrastructure and modernise its IT to stay competitive and significantly increase its customer base over the next three to five years.
I can honestly say out of all the programs I have been involved in, Future IT was the most successful and well-run program. It’s been an outstanding achievement more in terms of the way it was delivered, as much as it was what was delivered.”
Solution
Given that billing is at the core of the utility business, any transformation at EDF required careful consideration.
Given its decade-long relationship with TCS, EDF chose to partner with us for this large-scale business transformation programme for EBS.
EDF engaged TCS right at the start of the programme to arrive at a strategy and create the right technology platform by leveraging TCS’ deep domain knowledge of B2B business and technical expertise. We worked closely with the utility major to lead an upgrade to Oracle C2M and recommended hosting on AWS cloud for this transformation programme.
A key concern was the ability to match the performance of the on-premise database running on Oracle Exadata with the move to a database hosted on AWS. TCS, along with AWS and Navisite, performed a proof-of-concept (PoC) to demonstrate how AWS RDS can be configured to meet the required performance at a much lower cost and operational overhead. The results of the PoC removed uncertainty in the solution and boosted stakeholder confidence in their architectural decisions.
TCS anchored all programme management and delivery aspects, including design, architecture, build, test, migration and cutover. Contrary to the preferred strategy of a phased migration, which provides the business suitable controls to contain migration risks, TCS proposed a single-phase migration of the EBS customer base to the new platform. The migration approach was carefully designed to minimise risk and saved more than GBP 3 million (USD 3.8 million) in a year in potential additional project costs. An innovative cut-over approach was adopted using live data migration from production a week ahead of cutover to minimise operational downtime.
Keeping quality assurance in mind, TCS embedded a team of subject matter experts (SME), technology specialists and business operations personnel to support functional testing, created a unique simulation test approach to compare against production output and extensively tested against the non-functional criteria. TCS leveraged a location-independent agile delivery approach and delivered the entire programme remotely, with teams working from multiple locations in the UK, Europe, and India.
The programme benefitted from a carefully selected approach to cloud adoption, mitigation of technology risks through an innovative migration strategy, infrastructure and code release process automation and a unique business assurance approach. A high-performance team delivered the complex business transformation programme in 18 months.
More than 15TB of data—including 22 billion records in one table, over 700 business test scenarios and 80 integrations—was migrated over one weekend with minimal downtime and disruption to business operations once live. This was one of the first global implementations of Oracle C2M at such a scale and TCS' first large-scale implementation of the C2M application on the AWS cloud. This engagement reflects TCS’ strong relationship with EDF and partners like AWS, Oracle, and Navisite.
In my 22 years of experience in EDF, out of all the IT projects I have seen, Future IT is probably the best project we have delivered from an IT perspective.
Benefits
EDF has been able to effectively address the technical debt risk, delivering significant business benefits.
These include optimising payment processes, identifying inefficiencies in the billing process, and enhancing billing quality.
A modern cloud architecture enabled on-demand scalability, resulting in a more than 50% increase in day one billing volume, automatically improving monthly cash flow. The overall performance of the lead-to-quote process improved and compared to the previous year boosted sales by 50% for the mid-market segment within a shorter period.
The execution time for complex and large-volume billing has been reduced by more than eight times, improving overall billing performance, response time, and user and customer experience.
Overall, this solution has given EDF Business Solutions a reliable and scalable platform that can grow in line with its business growth targets and support the energy transition. The platform brought agility to the business, enabling commodity diversification as EDF Business Solutions ventured into a new market with its product launch.