Promoting clean energy with a state-of-the-art cloud solution
Sustainable energy production is critical to the health and well-being of people and the planet.
With that in mind, Great Britain’s Smart Export Guarantee (SEG) initiative aims to promote interest in renewable electricity generation by requiring electricity suppliers to enable small-scale generation of low-carbon electricity, which can then be exported to the national grid. In return, the supplier pays the customer for the exported electricity.
To that end, Centrica plc looks to make microgeneration as simple as possible for its retail and business customers.
But the application it was using to manage the process was out of date. Not only did the system need to be taken offline to perform regular maintenances, but it was also hard to find people with relevant skills for implementing changes. This stretched timelines for applying regulatory changes and put the business at risk of noncompliance. It also made deploying new capabilities, such as bank transfer payments, UX improvements, single sign-on, and address searching, costlier and more time-consuming – making it hard to justify the costs of implementing anything but mandatory requirements.
The application also struggled to manage increasing loads, making it clear that it would not be able to sustain the more than 200 new microgeneration customers Centrica is adding every month.
To effectively manage customer, contract, and billing data for microgeneration accounts, Centrica needed to build a modern, cutting-edge, and scalable solution in the cloud.
