How a Digital Sales Platform Enables the Digital Transformation of an Energy Group
E.ON is one of the largest energy suppliers on the European market. In Europe, the company serves around 52 million customers, 14 million of them in Germany. Its portfolio ranges from electricity and gas to energy-related customer solutions such as photovoltaics, energy storage, electromobility, and smart metering. The company’s goal is to supply sustainable energy and boost customer confidence in E.ON’s services. To reach this goal, E.ON has embarked on a digital journey that aims to establish global digital sales platforms by 2025 and a common technology platform by 2026. All processes—both in the energy grids and energy sales—must be digitalized and largely automated. In Germany, the journey towards the digital sales platform has already progressed greatly with our help.
The Challenge
A transformation of the traditional E.ON sales business was needed to succeed in the digitalization race. Typical role models of business as “requestor” and IT as “service provider” are ineffective, inefficient and inappropriate in the digital world. They cause misalignments, do not leverage the full potential of an integrated digital business, and do not meet customer needs.
BCG Platinion supports E.ON to develop a digital sales platform for the German energy market. The vision was to setup the digital sales platform, to implement new products in the platform within short sprints, and to subsequently enable the platform for other national and regional E.ON brands. The focus was on developing a state-of-the-art digital infrastructure and guide the agile transformation—a mind shift toward interdisciplinary ways of working.
The Approach
Tomorrow’s energy world required new methods to be managed successfully. In the digital world, value is created through cross-functional collaboration between business and digital teams. Therefore, E.ON and BCG Platinion have pursued organizational and structural changes while keeping the platform development going—with hands-on firefighting where required. To improve agility and interdisciplinary collaboration between business and IT, we transformed the agile organizational design. This enabled us to accelerate the development of new products and features.
Using DevOps practices and tools, we also enabled E.ON to build, deploy, test, and release as automated as possible in short development cycles. This increased the output of developed features and products as well as their efficiency tremendously. In figures: The features released per monthly cycle have been increased by a factor of four.
Furthermore, BCG Platinion’s role as a sparring partner with extensive knowledge of the key software vendors in the energy industry facilitated E.ONs transformation to become a real digital energy utility.
The Impact
The project has succeeded in rapidly stabilizing the digital sales platform and setting it up to facilitate future growth.
- Rapid transition from firefighting mode to stable progressive development already in the first few months
- Scaling the digital sales platform by migrating several million customers from the legacy landscape
- Servicing of now more than 6 million customers via the digital sales platform
- Feature-rich monthly releases without business interruption
- Strategic alignment of the platform to facilitate growth
- Enabling the platform to support further businesses of E.ON group in future
Looking Into the Future
Today, the customer is served with various digital offerings, and sales agents work with an easy-to-use platform for their tasks. Internally, the organizational structure and mindset changed and is now shaping the digital world.
The technical infrastructure of the digital sales platform is scalable, and the agile teams can implement future products and features with ease. Time-to-market is shortening; customers can close new contracts within less than 60 seconds. In the future, E.ON plans to add B2B core functionalities and to improve the customer journeys for other national brands as well.
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