Power & Utilities Customer Implements Enrollment Process for Residential and Commercial Customers Using Power Platform

Overview


VNB Consulting assisted a power and utilities organization create an enrollment process to enroll, retain and renew customers leveraging Power Apps and Power Automate

Customer Profile

Customer delivers electricity to more than 5 million consumers in 11 states. It ranks among the nation’s largest generators of electricity, owning nearly 38,000 megawatts of generating capacity in the U.S. It owns the nation’s largest electricity transmission system, a nearly 39,000-mile (63,000 km) network that includes 765 kilovolt ultra-high voltage transmission lines, more than all other U.S. transmission systems combined.

Customer Situation


INFLATION ANALYSIS USING POWER BI

Customer’s transmission system directly or indirectly serves about 11 percent of electricity demand in Electric Reliability Council of Texas which covers much of Texas. The customer was targeting at launching electricity services in ERCOT residential and commercial markets. To facilitate an early release for the launch, the customer was looking for options to host their web platform for consumers as well as their internal operations and support teams. Our Apps and Integration Team reviewed the ask and architected a low code operations platform based on Microsoft Power Platform. This meaningfully extended their existing investments in Microsoft Dynamics 365 to create the ERCOT Operations platform.

Our Solution Offering


After conducting a detailed assessment of the client’s requirements, our experts recommended an architecture using Power Apps Canvas and Model-driven apps along with Power Automate to integrate with backend system leveraging various API’s/connectors. As part of the assessment, we understood that a single point of entry and processing for the Sales representative's information gathering would cause a huge reduction in the time taken to achieve their goals. The Power Apps Model-driven App allowed the Contact center user to easily enroll, retain and renew Residential, Small Business and Commercial customers onto supply. The solution will reside between their website and back-end system and will support journeys for Contact Center, Contract Management, Sales and Admin role team members. They can navigate across various views in the Enrollment site map to get active, inactive, pending, failed etc. enrollments and process them further. Power Automate workflows were created to establish API connection with other systems to get data related to enrollment status, offer details, rate-change which would be used by Power Apps application leveraging the Power Apps custom connector. A business process flow was implemented for commercial enrollment to depict various stages of enrollment approval. A quick visual representation using business process flow helped the users to easily determine the stage where the enrollment request has reached and also enabled multi-level approvals by different teams for a Commercial enrollment. Role-based access was implemented to ensure certain features and areas of app are available only to the authorized people in the organization. Automated validation and approval mechanisms are built into the solution which are configurable via Microsoft Dataverse and enabled the operations to be robust, secure, and reliable. Fault toleration mechanism was implemented into all the back-end system integrations along with integration with public data platforms. Use of automated script for each screen for the contact center advocates made it easy for onboarding for new advocates. Precisely designed and documented scripts enhance customer experience on call to state of art level. The overall solution is a complete transformation in the way their contact center advocates and sales representatives interact with customer data and enabled some of the below benefits from a development and ongoing support and operations perspective.

Customer Benefits

  • No Downtime: Can easily add new features into existing Power Apps. There will less or no downtime of Power Apps. Business processes will not be impacted.
  • Easy to Understand: Microsoft Power Apps provides designer view which is very easy to understand by business users and operations teams.
  • Easy to Maintain: Our team of experts provided Customer team training on PowerApps development. This made them comfortable to make any changes to the app, if required, in near future.
  • Insights into Business Processes: With the integration of PowerApps, users can easily and quickly go through the whole workflow defined with various screens and review enrollment status.
  • Ease of use: Power Apps based solution is easy to use for the users. Contact center advocates spend less time navigating between multiple tools as everything is now contained within the Power App as a single point of data entry, approvals, dashboard for reports etc.

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