Imperatives

The utility environment is characterized in different countries by various forms and levels of market liberalization and competition. As a result, different markets and countries tend to have a different focus along the energy value chain.

Customer Service Satisfaction
There’s more focus on ensuring customer service satisfaction, meaning a greater focus on data quality and regulatory compliance. Improvement of customer information capabilities and improved capture of customer data are crucial to customer retention and for asset management strategy.

Dealing with Regulatory Pressures
Regulatory pressures impact the utilities industry more than most, with regulatory bodies becoming increasingly more vocal. The water sub-sector bears this pressure more than others. Adapting to new regulations is crucial as companies face heavy penalties for failure to comply. Regulations that are causing the greatest amount of pain are around areas of customer service levels, asset performance and country-specific regulations, such as the Traffic Management Act in the UK.

Fight Against Global Warming
The pressure on energy producers is going to increase through the combination of two forces:

• The EU, through its climate change and energy plan, requires 20% renewable energy (wind power, solar power, biomass) in the European producers energetic mix by 2020.
• The environmental awareness of European consumers and citizens keeps growing, with consumers expecting a real offer of green energy supply.

2008’s European Strategic Energy Technology Plan (SET-Plan) demonstrates the insufficiency of current European efforts toward energy efficiency, but it is not clear that its strategic proposals will be transposed to tangible and coordinated actions in the short term. Raising public concern about sustainable development tends to accelerate the development of nuclear energy in a growing number of countries worldwide.

Reducing Operational Costs
Utility companies have to reduce operational costs in order to remain competitive and satisfy shareholders, but also to combat the impact of higher resource costs such as labor and fuel.

Intelligent Grid
Adoption of alternative sources, distributed generation, energy storage devices, and more active consumers promote new telecommunications and control technologies and the creation of an Intelligent Grid environment.

The Intelligent Grid is the infrastructure enabler of the energies economy concept. As a matter of fact, its development is one of the strategies announced by the new US administration to fight against the economic crisis.

Supply Security
It is still a concern and, despite the economic crisis, investments will have to be continued in means such as electricity production. It also stays fragile because of differing European points of view regarding the need not to have a common policy on the supply of Russian gas, on which Europe stays dependant.

Toward a Fluid and Competitive Unique Mar ket in the EU
There are still intentions within the EU to harmonize the gas and electricity prices between EU members, where the gap is still high (ratio from one to three for the mass market). The aim is to create a unique, fluid, and competitive energy market in the European Union.

Business trends

Improving customer satisfaction levels and developing cross-selling opportunities are areas of focus in the energy sub-sector. Customer intimacy and customer assistance in efficient energy consumption leads to premises-located technologies such as smart energy meters.

There is also a strong focus on cost control and cost reduction with the high price of wholesale gas playing a key factor. Utilities companies are moving to strategic automation of specific processes and improved asset management as a means to reduce costs. The efficiency of support functions also needs to be optimized through shared services.

Improvement of inter-company processes is a key driver to enable preparedness for mergers and alliances.

Unified billing is a significant challenge as large business change is required to facilitate the move from multiple bills. Generation of accurate and timely bills would be the next major challenge for utilities organizations.

Energy trading and risk-management activities, driven by oil and gas price volatility, continue to push Energy Management Systems (EMS) and Energy Trading and Risk Management (ETRM) solutions. Within-day trading, which is closer to real time and reduces imbalances and penalties, is a strong trend for operations improvement.

Utilities will define an overall security architecture for both information and operational technology, based on utility advanced metering infrastructure concepts.

Impact technologies

The majority of businesses have initiatives for a mobility strategy. Remote workers will benefit from the mobile applications that are now being deployed. By making the utilities enterprise systems available to field staff (internal and contractors), duplication and costs will be reduced.

Due to the development of smart grids, smart metering projects are in progress in some European countries such as France, the UK, Netherlands, and Spain, especially for the electricity market. Gas smart meter projects tend to be included in trial with electricity smart meter pilots in order to test system mergers.

Mobile applications, as well as smart metering, will improve customer data capture and this, coupled with Business Intelligence in the form of predictive analytics and dashboards, will help to improve customer satisfaction levels and provide improved cross-selling opportunities.

Access to information across many different types of interface, fixed and mobile, can be provided through Enterprise Portals. These would also ensure that the right information is made available to the right people in a way that is consistent and offers good usability.

Future ‘Power Boxes’ marketed by suppliers will be able to use the Tele-Information Customer (TIC) electricity smart meter output, coupled with an ADSL gateway to recover data and / or control domestic equipments.

Example of applications:

• Electric consumption monitoring (online or with the Power Box screen or a computer linked to the Power Box).
• Remote control of the electrical fitting.
• Remote control of the all domestic utilities consumption (for example, water, gas).
  

Brought together with Legacy Management, Service-Oriented Architecture can advance the wealth of diverse legacy systems to a more flexible, accessible solution. This will be important after mergers and acquisitions.

Integration and access to operational data will be a key factor in delivering customer service satisfaction. Master Data Management can be useful for ensuring that information is accessible and consistent across the organization. An increase in data integrity is an important requirement in the drive to reduce staff numbers.

In addition, organizations will benefit from rationalizing their application portfolios. Legacy application portfolio rationalization will be beneficial.

A real-time view of information across all of the business’s data sources by way of Master Data Management will help the move toward unified billing with accurate and timely bills.

Within the utilities sphere, there is limited use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, which is being restricted at present to meter asset tracking.

Utilities companies will be looking to use Business Process Management for tactical automation of specific processes and this will be one of the key drivers for reducing costs.

Enterprise Asset Management including Remote Sensors (in meters), RFID, GIS, and GPS will be used to proactively maintain assets and lengthen their lifecycle and reduce costs as well as help with customer retention. It will also provide the granular data required for asset performance metrics.

Enterprise Content Management will be essential in adapting to and complying with new regulations. It will be an important factor in ensuring content information is stored securely, maintained consistently and retrievable in many different ways to meet the different demands of increasingly global organizations.

New Web 2.0 technologies can facilitate knowledge transfer and collaboration, both internally and externally with suppliers, partners, and customers alike.