Energy Distributor Saves Hundreds of Thousands of Euros Automating Complex Business Processes

ENGIE, a global energy distributor used the OutSystems platform to build a nomination and balancing solution called HARPON (HARmonized POwer Nomination) in a mere 28 weeks. By automating previously manual, complex processes, HARPON allowed the energy distributor to reduce imbalances and penalties by 80%, saving hundreds of thousands of Euros. With this solution, the company can now focus on future growth and innovation.

Improve the Nomination and Balancing Program, Handle Complexity, Integrate with Backend Systems

Challenge - As a global energy player and an expert operator in electricity, natural gas and energy services, ENGIE relies on nomination and balancing programs to help manage gas flow, minimize operational imbalances and avoid costs associated with penalties.The nomination and balancing program saves individuals and businesses money by carefully measuring energy usage. Implementing this process was mission critical, and becoming increasingly complex due to the global company.

ENGIE operates in 70 countries, each with its own requirements and regulations for the nomination process. In some cases, ENGIE operates under multiple different legal entities within the same market. Because of these variances, operators were performing the nomination process differently in each region and relying on Microsoft’s Excel. Business users were manually writing thousands lines of XML code instead of focusing on the business.of energy production and disbursement. As a result, this hand-coding was time consuming, incurred high operational and IT maintenance costs, and increased the risk of operational failure, often resulting in penalties. The current process also forced operators to focus on generating XML rather than on optimizing the process and identifying market opportunities.

ENGIE sought a solution that would standardize the nomination process while accounting for regional differences, thereby minimizing penalties. The company wanted a power scheduling application to be able to operate any market for the different legal entities without concern for the technical details relating to market-specific formats. Thus, the solution needed to incorporate an enormous set of integrations and business rules. The nature of consumable energies demands a required uptime of close to 100% and near real-time response.

Why OutSystems?

ENGIE failed to find a commercial off-the-shelf solution that addressed its complex business needs. Building a custom solution via traditional methods would have taken too long. After some research, energy distributor sought a Rapid Application Delivery solution. They turned to OutSystems because of its ability to deliver complex, custom applications in a timely manner.
OutSystems Platform gave ENGIE the ability to focus on designing the right solution versus performing tedious hand coding, or getting involved with time-consuming and complex integrations in with back-end systems.

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Harmonized Power Nomination Solution

Solution - Using the OutSystems platform, ENGIE built a nomination and balancing solution in only 28 weeks. The HARPON solution delivers a uniform and optimized toolset for scheduling, capacity auctioning and commodity bidding, covering different power markets around the globe. The solution enables power operators to focus on their core business by reducing manual data entry and duplication, while shielding them from data transformation tasks and technical communication details.

“OutSystems helped us deliver an energy trading app that allows us to make better and faster trading decisions, often close to the deadline.”

Bart Pues, Development Manager

HARPON enables users to manage power scheduling and nomination processes in a uniform manner, independent of the operational, functional and geographic scope. Using a set of uniformly designed dashboards, it allows users to drill down on operational data within each market. It abstracts the external nomination specifics to TSOs (Transmission System Operator) and other market players from the operational users, so business users don’t have to worry about the specifics in each market.

Solution Capabilities

• Position Management
• Scheduling and Nominations
• Capacity Management
• Bidding Management
• Centralized Energy Data Management
• Complies with the ENTSO-e standards
• Supports EU regulatory requirements (REMIT/ EMIR)
• Integrations: ETRM (GPS/ADCS), HTC, IPOP, MDC, ADAM, SOPTIM, MailServices
• Multi-entity
• Multi-language, multi-country

“HARPON Provides Powerful Cost Savings while Remaining Scalable”

With HARPON ENGIE minimizes financial risks by streamlining operations related to nomination and balancing across Central and Western Europe. Four legal entities currently operate their markets in eight countries with over 18 balancing groups.

The OutSystems platform aided ENGIE to create a solution that met their current needs in record time, while also providing the company with a development platform that is flexible and scalable enough to support future needs. As ENGIE enters new markets or regulations change, HARPON is easily modifiable - ensuring that the process remains aligned with the business. Without the OutSystems platform the existing solution would require ENGIE to painstakingly code a new custom project for each market, in each geographic location. Now with HARPON in place, changes within the process occurs within a matter of days.

• 80% penalty reduction
• 90% productivity gains
• 2 weeks training time
• Allows the intraday desk to fully focus on the core business and conduct trades without worries close to closing gates.
• Training time reduced from two months to two weeks, and full-time employees were reduced by 25%