Case Study

District heating: improving operational processes with SSE

Merging of existing Billing Systems into a single one embedded in a complex application map, integrated with Salesforce and SAP Fi-Cax.

Where: italy
Challenge
A2A is a leading energy services group in Italy, with the "A2A Calore e Servizi" provides heat management and district heating services in the cities of Brescia, Milan, Bergamo, and Cremona. A2A is required to merge billing services into three central offices and to rationalize existing applications to reduce complexity and improve operational processes.
Approach
To meet the customer's needs, we at Engineering involved both process experts from the heat and district heating management market and resources with in-depth knowledge of system integration of complex projects. Organizing the project into 4 consecutive and progressive streams has guaranteed continuity of service, respecting the contractual deadlines set for the issuing of invoices, and effectively managing integration with Salesforce's CRM solutions, SAP's FI-Cax solution Credit and HP's Metering Sides. The constant and continuous collaboration between the teams enabled the achievement of quality targets within the planned project deadlines.
Solution
For each of the 4 project streams, a specific software release was foreseen that included gap analysis activities, for the identification and implementation of additional functionalities not foreseen by the SSE solution, the migration of customer data from the existing systems, and the installation of the solution in the operational environment. The types of billable contracts concerned district heating, district heating supply and management, and heat management services, with a package-driven approach and system integration activities to manage the evolutions. The continuous AMS support ensured the technological and regulatory update of the application map architecture. It was thus possible to manage the requests for regulatory adaptation of technical quality, bill transparency, and reading quality resolved by ARERA in the following years.
Results
Markets
Ecosystem

Impacts

Technologies

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