As technology continues to permeate more and more of what we do, more and more of our physical reality is being downloaded into the virtual reality. Managing this change effectively is going to be one of the greatest challenges for businesses in the next 10 years.
The goal: to thread technology through the business to unlock the reams of data which sit behind the digital twin of how utilities firms currently operate in the physical world.
The use case most commonly associated with this is asset management. But it’s the power of the digital workflows powering the processes that connect these assets that will be the biggest value-add. It’ll redefine how you currently work, bringing the power to simulate, predict and automate intelligently to create agile and robust operations on a level almost incomprehensible today.
Today, the focus is still on rip and replace. How can we do what we do today in the observable reality in the digital world? However, the true value lies in using digital to innovate by completely reimagining how you work today, don’t be confined by what exists already.
Widespread digital transformation attempts across the utilities sector has seen a huge increase in the amount of operational and transactional data being produced. But, the key is managing this data effectively to be able to draw the insights that inform decision making. Many organisations are still using the rationale that data is an IT undertaking rather than one for the business as a whole. However, for utilities businesses, data is critical for providing operational insight to help identify sources for improving efficiency or the service provided to customers.
Here are some data insight use cases that bring this to life:
Forecast changes – Leveraging data, and the power of AI, are crucial in identifying possible bottlenecks that can be resolved before they become an issue. Critical for the utilities sector will be forecasting demand and identifying hidden patterns in the data that might give away insights of how customers are going to behave in the future.
Personalise Customer Experience – For example, how can you use customer data to uncover trends in at-risk customers? A combination of historical payment data, demographical data, customer interaction records among others, make it possible to identify early trend signals identifying those customers that are most likely to miss payments.
Customer Retention – Customer churn is a killer to many companies due to the cost of onboarding and off-boarding customers. Hidden in the data are clues that not only show why customers leave, but pinpoint those that are likely to be next, and when. This gives sales, customer service and marketing teams a focus for their resources.
How do you go about making this a reality for your business?
Each new insight is unlocking a new opportunity to improve, adapt and innovate. Across the sector we’re seeing more and more organisations adopting connected technologies, with a particular focus on Platform as a Service. This improves their ability to deliver best-in-class services by integrating the full information-base across the entire business into a single data model, on a single platform. Consistent and reliable data that updates in real-time gives the business the confidence to generate real-time analytics that shape the strategic direction and ultimately the transition from the observable reality to the data reality.
At Crossfuze, we use the ServiceNow platform to help utilities organisations integrate and communicate across their systems infrastructure to create that unified repository for their data. From here, Machine Learning, AI and Analytics, native platform functionality, can be leveraged to draw crucial insights that shape the digital workflows that make up their processes. We often start small, a customer workflow deployment or an IT workflow deployment. But our ultimate goal is to digitally transform businesses from end-to-end to fully digitise that observable reality. From there, the possibilities are endless and it’s possible to completely reimagine how they currently operate to differentiate them as the undisputed leaders in their sector.
If you’re interested in understanding in more detail how we’re going about making this a reality for our customers, please get in touch at letstalk@crossfuze.com or reach out to me personally at oliver.nowak@crossfuze.com.