The challenge
A major U.S. power utility that supplies electricity and natural gas to commercial and industrial customers in 15 states needed to streamline its application and system portfolio. The utility’s pricing process challenged its pricing specialists because they were unable to capture or enter sub-components in the system at a granular level, leading to inaccurate and sub-optimal pricing. In addition, the utility’s existing framework didn’t offer segmented pricing and limited its flexibility to launch products with exciting new offers. The utility wanted to rebuild its pricing system to enhance accuracy, flexibility and the customer experience by consolidating its applications and building a new content management system (CMS).
Our approach
Cognizant's utilities experts partnered with the utility on an application consolidation program called Amplify. It not only enhanced the utility’s process and operational efficiency but also helped improve the customer experience. The program covered 15 states, six independent system operators (ISOs) and the regional electricity authorities, each of which follows an independent set of rules. Amplify enhances the pricing systems that calculate the cost of components, capturing cost components in a new database and enabling the utility to develop integration services to transform its retail cost components.
Because the utility’s customers were dissatisfied with its existing framework, it built a new CMS on the Sitecore platform to fix invalid pricing issues and push relevant offers to customers at the time of renewal. The platform also alerts customers to special offers and improves the utility’s product mix by enabling it to introduce bundled products. We adopted an agile methodology to deliver this project, deploying incremental functionality at the end of each four-week sprint.
