Airtricity

Fujitsu was chosen by Airtricity to lead the analysis, design, implementation and delivery of the re-engineered processes and the integration of their I.T. applications with the marketplace to ensure the solution passed formal certification before going live.

Customer’s Challenge

Airtricity is one of Europe's leading fully integrated renewable energy companies. Airtricity has three main areas of focus: wind farm development, finance and ownership of wind farms and green energy supply. One of Airtricity’s main aims is to explore opportunities in the renewable energy sector. In February 2005 a new bill came into being which decreed that all electricity consumers in the Republic of Ireland should be free to choose their own electricity supplier.

As part of the programme to implement the changes necessary to open the market, the state supplier of electricity, the Electricity Supply Board (ESB), conducted a consultative process with market participants; developing 25 standard market procedures and 88 standard electronic files for data exchange. Each market procedure requires a number of sequential interactions between Parties.

This presented Airtricity with significant challenges in reorienting its existing business processes and legacy systems to participate in a marketplace which now had a formal market design. Iain Wright, Project Business Sponsor commented “Deregulation of the electricity markets in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland represented both a major opportunity and a major challenge to Airtricity.” This coupled with an immoveable “market opening” date, lead Airtricity to be faced with an urgent, mission-critical need to re-align their operations so they could participate in this radically changing marketplace.

Fujitsu’s Solution

Airtricity initiated a Market Opening Programme which they felt was necessary to prepare them to successfully compete in the deregulated electricity supply marketplace. The Programme had to validate and re-engineer operations functions across sales & marketing, customer care, registration and customer billing functions to integrate fully with a formal market design.

Fujitsu was chosen by Airtricity to lead the analysis, design, implementation and delivery of the re-engineered processes and the integration of their I.T. applications with the marketplace to ensure the solution passed formal certification before going live. Fujitsu and Airtricity worked together to ensure existing systems were modified to suit the changed market, while implementing new layers of business and application logic to ensure maximum re-use at minimum cost.

Benefits to our Customer

The Fujitsu Market Opening solution allowed Airtricity to:

Remain in the electricity supply business after full deregulation of the marketplace. This was achieved by delivering process and systems change to a fixed delivery deadline.
Retain their existing systems, whilst overcoming a critical change in the market place. This was achieved through Fujitsu providing an open solution architecture. Airtricity were no longer tied to their legacy systems, whose upgrade would have been limited and costly. Airtricity also retained full control of their future infrastructure.
Automate a previously manual processing system which gave Airtricity greater data integrity and accuracy. This was achieved by the solution architecture designed by Fujitsu.

Our Approach

Regina Moran, chief operating officer with Fujitsu Services Ireland commented, ‘The key to a project like this is developing a deeper understanding of what really matters to an organisation, its staff and its partners’.

So to begin with, Fujitsu documented Airtricity’s internal service delivery processes and mapped these against the new processes that arose out of market deregulation. As a result of process changes that occurred because of market deregulation Fujitsu provided a system which delivered these new processes, which Airtricity staff were unfamiliar with, and converted these into a format recognisable by Airtricity’s staff.

This resulted in large cost savings for Airtricity in the area of staff training. Additional interfaces were designed and built for legacy systems while retaining the capacity for easy integration with future solutions. Fujitsu then went onto design and build a data repository containing customer data. Fujitsu then migrated Airtricity’s coding information to match those changes defined centrally as part of the market deregulation programme. Fujitsu performed Training Needs Analysis, developed training plans, created custom-built training materials, and subsequently managed and delivered the training programme to Airtricity’s operations staff.

Fujitsu were responsible for the successful planning, tracking, reporting, resource management, vendor management and completion of the programme. Fujitsu project managed this project and a similar market opening project in another jurisdiction, in parallel. This was a large project and included a diverse team, including Fujitsu and Airtricity staff, billing vendors and two other consultancy firms.

Our Expertise

Fujitsu has a proven track record in providing innovative and reliable IT services and solutions, incorporating the best and most appropriate technology that creates value for its customers by helping them to realise their business vision and deliver impeccable customer service.

Fujitsu worked with Airtricity to blend the past with the future, providing continuity and support during a time of immense business change, whilst adding value to strategic new initiatives to help take Airtricity’s business forward.

"Fujitsu Services were engaged by Airtricity at a very early stage of an industry wide initiative involving the redesign of Business to Business processes” says Colin Rogan, Chief Information Officer, Airtricity. “The initiative for Airtricity represented a major business change from loosely defined semi-automated business to business processes to fully automated highly structured business to business transaction processes. Fujitsu worked in close partnership with Airtricity’s business and IT staff to help interpret and plan the actions needed to react to these external changes. For Airtricity flexibility from our supplier was key and Fujitsu at all times shared ownership for delivery of this key business transition, helping to rapidly build and deploy a mixed team of business and IT specialists to react to market change. Working with dynamically changing external business requirements Fujitsu demonstrated the pragmatism to ensure key milestones were met." says Rogan.

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