A Case Study On Corona Energy

Corona Energy is a leading independent gas and electricity supplier with over 25 years’ experience servicing UK businesses. They currently supply 14% of the industrial and commercial gas market with around 13,000+ customers across gas and electricity and over 77,000 meters.

A Brief Overview of The Challenge

Following rapid expansion over a short duration and changing customer behaviour, Corona Energy required a new client portal to meet the high demands of their 13,000+ corporate and SME user base. Some of the company’s key objectives for the project included: 

• Projection of live (real-time) account details 
• Decreased number of system interactions for consumers 
• More effective and assisted query process 
• Integration of numerous data sources 
• Enhancement of the overall client experience 
• Mobile compatibility

What made this project complex and challenging was the fact that the old system needed to remain ‘in-flight’ while the new platform was under development. Furthermore, the new platform required multiple third-party integrations including Corona’s customer billing & engagement platform, Mecoms 365 by Ferranti. 

Who Is Cloud Energy?

Cloud Energy is a specialist software agency for the energy and utilities industries. With over 20 years’ experience, they partner with some of the world’s leading utilities and energy businesses, manufacturers and pioneering SMEs, providing a variety of services to handle any commercial or operational software objective, including strategic planning, software development and digital team augmentation. 

Possessing a deep understanding for IoT and how to work with data-driven organisations, the company specialises in the development of digital tools to capture, integrate, and visualise data more effectively. So, whether that’s creating a business intelligence platform to analyse data from thousands of devices, designing dashboards that highlight cost-saving opportunities, or developing software to power new tech, they can help. 

Ultimately, these tools transform business performance and the customer experience through the deployment of touch points like websites, apps and reporting tools that can propel your company forward.

The Solution Deployed By Cloud Energy

The team at Cloud Energy spent time collaborating with the Corona team to ensure their understanding of the 13,000+ end-users could lead the development of the technology. Cloud Energy then created and evaluated how each user journey would go from one screen to the next and made sensible judgments on how pages would load while processing huge amounts of data.

The Portal has been created based on an integration with Corona's Customer Engagement & Billing system; Mecoms 365 (Ferranti). This platform gives access to the power and flexibility of Microsoft Dynamics 365, tailored to the specific needs of the energy and utility company concerned. Several APIs were therefore developed in collaboration with Ferranti to facilitate the real-time data transfer between the two networks, enabling the real-time visualisation of the following: 

• Payment, Billing, and Account Balance data for the full portfolio
• Contract/Document Access
• Interactive Query Management
• Instant capture of manual reading data
• Access to Contracts and Documents 
• Collaborative Query Management 
• Simple Dashboards demonstrating the use and expenditure 
• Secure Multi-factor Verification

The Result

Download Cloud Energy's whitepaper to learn more about the tactics and strategies used by them and the result of the project, only on Whitepapers Online.