Under the motto “Visions become practice”, the bdew invited people to the specialist conference “The digital energy industry” on March 15, 2018 in the Turbine Hall of the Düsseldorf municipal utilities. With around 220 participants, the industry was very attentive and interested. The study “bdew/AT Kearney – Digital@EVU” shows why the interest is so high: just 20% of energy suppliers have a digital roadmap.

“Digitalization is the only alternative and is particularly customer-driven”

– said Heike Heim, CEO of Dortmund Energy and Water Supply (DEW21); making DEW21 a very positive example of the digital movement in the industry. Ms. Heim sees the most important challenge as being the “monetization of customer data.” She pointed out that new ways of addressing customers based on data must be developed in sales, covering the online and offline world across all channels.

There is no way around data analytics and artificial intelligence

With their presentation on the topic of “Data Analytics”, Andreas Dutz, Industry Solution Lead Utilities at Microsoft, and Tobias Hirning, Business Development Manager at ITVT Group, were able to demonstrate a way to monetize customer data. It was important to both of them that the analytics area no longer consists only of a business intelligence tool, but is enriched with cloud applications and cloud services such as machine and deep learning. The tools presented by Microsoft and ITVT form the X-ray machine for data from the areas of product management, sales, marketing and service. The insights from the data can be used directly and provide answers to the following questions:

• So what is profitable?
• Why is customer Mr. Maier calling me today?
• What customer value does Mr. Müller have?
• Which products do I offer to which customer, at what price and at what time on which channel?

“Analytics, machine learning and deep learning are the future and offer profound possibilities: every employee and therefore every end customer benefits from them. We use the findings directly in the customer’s applications for, for example, next-best actions, recommendations, etc.,” says Tobias Hirning from the ITVT Group.

Data – Data – Data or THE potential for the energy industry

“The data is available in the provider’s premises or also on the market. The Microsoft ecosystem ultimately offers the analysis tools for this,” says Mr. Hirning. During the bdew conference, Microsoft’s data visualization tool Power BI was presented. “Digitization alone does not make money – we need to use digital tools to create transparency, get much closer to the customer, implement new business models and thus increase sales and margins,” explains Mr. Hirning.

Utilities must organize cultural change

In addition to practical examples, the topic of “cultural change” also came into focus. “Digitization is a management issue,” said Google manager Stefan Hentschel in his presentation. Stefan Kapferer, Chairman of the bdew Management Board, also underlined this thesis in his keynote speech.