Success Story
One of the largest energy companies in Europe, needed a solution to enhance their reporting operations, enable real-time analysis and minimize dependencies across systems. Scalefocus implemented an event-based streaming platform, which was the company’s first step towards a real-time PnL. Our solution greatly enhanced the company’s digital landscape, reduced costs of reporting, and opened opportunities for previously unfeasible use cases that required flexibility and simultaneous execution.
30x Decrease in Reporting Time
70% Reduced Task/Workflow Rerun
17% Reduced Reporting Costs
The Client
Our client is a utility company operating internationally across Europe. The company’s trading business includes mid-to-large scale asset-based portfolio management and encompasses complex origination business. It primarily trades commodities such as electricity, emissions certificates, natural gas, renewables, and a vast range of financial derivatives. Additionally, the company owns and manages a gas infrastructure business.
The Solution
After an initial analysis phase, carried out jointly with client stakeholders and architects, we concluded that streaming technologies were a great fit. Our team proceeded to design a platform for event-based data processing. As part of the initial feasibility study, we implemented a PoC, which was later extended to a fully-fledged solution.
A significant accomplishment during this project was leveraging the event-based streaming technologies to enable close to real-time data processing and reporting. Furthermore, our dedicated streaming platform allowed for the execution of calculations and data manipulations outside of the ETRMs, which mitigated dependencies with the existing ETRM landscape. On top of that, by storing intermediate data, our solution effectively rendered disparate data silos obsolete and unified them in a single source of truth.
We employed a modern approach for data integration and management, focused on several key points:
Rapid data availability to enable close to real-time reporting;
Minimized dependencies between price dependent/independent results – this opens the opportunity of redesigning reporting processes and reducing complexities in the future;
Improved integration monitoring, reporting parallelization and troubleshooting;
High availability, so that business-critical processes can run without downtime.
Results
Our platform began as a PoC and was subsequently tested in real-world scenarios and implemented in a production environment afterwards. The solution is already rolled out to several critical data streams, such as Positions, Nominals, Risk, and Compliance Reporting. According to our client’s testimony, such a transformation allowed for the exploration and implementation of previously unfeasible use cases, due to heavy coupling between trading applications and batch-based data processing.
The close to real-time data availability we made possible has become a key element in their reporting operations. It has accelerated decision-making and enabled actions based on analysis of series of events that have just happened.
Having a common integration layer allowed our client to improve important operational KPIs significantly:
30% decrease in reporting time;
70% reduction of crashed tasks due to drastically improved reporting process execution stability;
30% reduction in redundant data;
Data management costs have been significantly reduced due to the lower data amounts;
New use cases have been unlocked leading to increased business satisfaction.
Our Work
We have a global client base that includes Fortune 500 companies, innovative startups and industry leaders in Information Technology, E-Commerce, Insurance, Healthcare, Finance and Energy & Utilities.
