Building a digital energy business for the future through agile transformation

EnBW (Energie Baden-Württemberg AG) is one of the largest energy supply companies in Germany—supplying electricity, gas, water and energy-related products and services to approximately 5.5 million customers. It’s comprised of many subsidiaries, including Netze BW, which handles network management for EnBW—in terms of both network operations and network expansion. With the increasing pace of digitalization in the energy market and changing customer expectations, Netze BW is digitally transforming its business model and processes and turned to CGI for help.

Assembling an agile team—in an agile way

Netze BW needed to begin the project immediately and complete it within a tight timeframe, but faced a shortage of agile skills. CGI offered Netze BW an agile team that could begin work immediately and ramp up, as necessary. The team had full agile capabilities that extended from development to testing to production. In addition, team members could work onsite with Netze BW and speak German, while offering innovative thinking, ideas and solutions through an advanced, German-based Digital Lab, as well as through CGI’s global capabilities and footprint.

From the start, CGI demonstrated its commitment through proximity to the client, meeting face-to-face to present its proposal. The entire CGI team was on hand to ask and answer questions, which led to a rich dialogue on Netze BW’s opportunities and challenges. After winning the bid, CGI had an agile team working onsite at Netze BW within two weeks. Netze BW also benefitted from CGI’s scalable approach—within six months, the team nearly doubled in size to meet the company’s changing requirements.

Moving to a new customer and supplier service model

Using agile and DevOps approaches, the CGI team moved the company from manual to web- and mobile-based processes across its customer and supplier operations. New applications and interfaces were built to digitalize and integrate sales and service, procurement, ordering and delivery processes.

In the past, manual processes dominated the company’s customer and supplier operations and required manual change in the face of evolving requirements. Today, these processes are streamlined and automated, and changes can be made quickly and easily as the business dictates.

Improvements to these processes have not only driven efficiencies and cost savings for Netze BW, but also have provided its customers and suppliers with faster and easier access to services and support. 

The company’s number of online customers has significantly increased, along with its number of online service orders. In addition, supplier relationships have been strengthened.

To learn more about Netze BW, read our case study.