Digitisation of Meter-to-Cash

Overview

​

A leading renewable energy company required global project management and process efficiency expertise to lead the digital transformation of their core meter-to-cash process. This process handled €1 billion in annual revenue, spanned 500 assets with a production capacity of 3 GW, and operated across 8 countries.

The project revealed that the current process was highly manual and time-consuming, with many tasks being carried out in local Excel files that lacked proper controls.  There was no single source of truth for data, leading to confusion among staff and additional efforts to resolve reporting discrepancies.  Asset managers were spending too much time preparing data rather than analysing and acting on it. The process varied by country, lacked scalability, and operating costs and headcount were growing in line with the expanding asset base.

​

Approach

​

•Assembled a project team with members from Asset Management, Finance, and IT.  Established a governance structure to align stakeholders, to secure funding and confirm resource allocation.

​

•Assessed the current process flow, identified pain points, estimated process times, and created visual outputs to clearly show process performance for each country.

​

•Collated data sources, including meter data aggregators, SCADA providers, off-takers, market agents, and guarantees of origin.

​

•Designed a future state vision and solution to address pain points, digitise data flow, and largely automate the end-to-end process.

​

•Collected user requirements and pilot-tested interim solutions to validate the future state concepts.

​

•Conducted a Request for Information (RFI) to explore the feasibility of off-the-shelf solutions.

​

•Performed a business case analysis of "build vs. buy" options, considering lead times, risks, & benefits.

​

•Aligned team members and stakeholders around a common, recommended best solution.

​

Outcome

​

•Secured funding and obtained senior leadership approval to proceed with developing and deploying the proposed solution across all countries.

​

•The solution generates annual savings of €759k through headcount reduction and insourcing of third-party activities.

​

•Automation of the process and digitisation of data flow enables users to optimise asset performance and it future-proofs the process.