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Empowering utilities through 360-degree views of customers
IBM Business Partner Performance Technologies helps organizations from all industry sectors solve business and technology challenges through innovation and transformation
It’s typical for large companies to have valuable data distributed across multiple operational systems. In addition, the data is modeled, classified and governed in different ways, making it hard for companies to gain rapid or reliable insights.
Stavros Stavrinoudakis, Director of the Analytics Business Unit at Performance Technologies, explains how his company recently helped ELPEDISON S.A., a large Greek utility company, take back control of its business data and use it to drive more intelligent decisions.
ELPEDISON recognized the increasing value of its vast stores of customer data, especially with the growing potential of AI to anticipate customer needs and communicate in highly personalized ways. The first step in unlocking these new capabilities was to gain a comprehensive, unified view of customers and enterprise data. This was achieved by centralizing all relevant data and implementing consistent governance and control measures.
Julie Simou, Head of Data Management at ELPEDISON S.A., highlights how implementing an Enterprise Data Management Framework, combined with data governance principles, enabled staff to better identify valuable data, leading to more efficient decision-making and overall operational improvements for the company.
A competitive tender process was conducted by the Procurement Department of ELPEDISON to select a data management and recovery solution. Performance Technologies won the tender as it met all the required criteria by proposing a data integration and governance solution with IBM Cloud Pak® for Data and IBM® Knowledge Catalog. In technology terms, the cloud-native solution is based on microservices, containerized on Red Hat® OpenShift® on IBM Cloud®, and is provided as a full software as a service (SaaS) offering, managed and maintained by Performance Technologies.
As an IBM Platinum Partner with a strong track record of success, Performance Technologies were able to demonstrate the right technical certifications and skills, plus the ability to take their project from concept through to 24x7 operational support.
This was more than a technical project. ELPEDISON aimed to consolidate and organize data from 30,000 database tables while establishing and upholding comprehensive governance, security, privacy, and control policies throughout the organization. Performance Technologies collaborated closely with IBM, particularly during the initial setup, embedding IBM energy and utilities data catalog and tailoring ELPEDISON business terminology to the data platform. This customization helps understand the metadata within ELPEDISON systems, ensuring accurate data identification and classification in line with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU Data Act, the EU AI Act and security policies.
The IBM Data Management platform serves as a vital central resource, providing data catalogs and dictionaries that enable ELPEDISON to manage customer-related data through a governance layer spanning 45 operational systems. This structure allows for straightforward data traceability and establishes data ownership over critical data elements, enhancing data-driven decision-making across the company’s business units. The solution incorporates ELPEDISON comprehensive Enterprise Data Management Framework, which encompasses governance policies and documentation aimed at creating a unified control point for data quality, validation, metadata completeness, data lineage, remediation and traceability.
Our joint work with IBM helps provide accurate and consistent business data for reporting and analytics in a timely manner. By uniting data that was previously siloed, the solution helps ELPEDISON improve customer service processes and speed, which should help enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
ELPEDISON staff can now more easily query data, analyze the root causes of any identified issues and take the appropriate remedial action. As all data types are now visible in the central data catalogs, the company can access a true 360-degree view of the enterprise, helping to enhance customer journeys across all their interactions.
Another key use case for the solution is identifying missing or low-quality data, which drives the business to run customer campaigns aimed at improving data maintenance. This allows ELPEDISON to increase trust in its data, leading to more accurate and relevant services and recommendations for customers.
Beyond the analytical benefits, the solution helps ELPEDISON to identify and resolve issues related to the confidentiality and proper handling of sensitive and personally identifiable information. Key compliance stakeholders such as Dat Protection Office (DPO), Internal Audit Office, Internal Control and Credit Control departments gain visibility into all personal and confidential data storage and can check that it is managed in accordance with internal policies and external regulations, safeguarding compliance.
As ELPEDISON expands its use of AI, the IBM Data Management platform will provide extra value to the organization by aligning data usage, data ownership and compliance with the EU AI Act. ELPEDISON journey to AI is on an achievable roadmap because of the company decision to invest in the Enterprise Data Management Framework. Simply adding AI systems on top of data can make it hard to protect against hallucinations and bias in models. We believe that the best practice is to establish a robust business and technology Enterprise Data Management Framework, which ELPEDISON has already accomplished.
Extending the solution to other domains
This project showcases the strong partnership that we at Performance Technologies have built with IBM. We’ve invested in skills and technologies that bring value to our joint clients, and we’re really happy with the close support and training from IBM.
Our utilities-focused solution could be adapted for other industries such as financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing and so on. We’re already working with IBM to extend it, and it’s great to have IBM specialized industry-vertical accelerators to help us break into other domains and repeat our success there.
Headquartered in Athens, Greece, ELPEDISON S.A. (link resides outside of IBM.com) is a leading company both in electricity production and supply, and gas supply. It aspires to always be one of the most important players in its sector, offering energy services of the highest quality, at competitive prices, with stability and consistency.
Headquartered in Athens, Greece, Performance Technologies (link resides outside IBM.com) is a leading provider of business and technology services to organizations across all sectors. From cloud and transformation to cybersecurity and business continuity, and from business automation to data-driven decision-making, Performance Technologies loves helping its clients solve their biggest challenges.
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Examples presented as illustrative only. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.
