Companies like Electricité de France (EDF) must constantly seek to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction in a highly competitive and lively energy sector. One area that has seen significant advancement—through technology adoption by competitive necessity—is electricity contracting for companies. By integrating business orchestration through Camunda, EDF has optimized and orchestrated its contract process, leading to impressive returns on investment and overall operational improvements.
During CamundaCon 2024 in Berlin, Alexis Madelin, the Product Owner of BPM EDF, took to our main stage with a compelling presentation (available on demand). He shared his insights into how EDF, one of the globe’s largest electric utility companies, efficiently manages a customer base of around 27 million, spanning residential and commercial sectors. Alexis highlighted the daunting challenges faced by the energy powerhouse, mainly due to the high volume of contracts and the intricacy of process managing them across over 80 applications. He detailed how the process was bogged down by repetition and time-consuming tasks such as collating information from these many apps and coordinating activities across multiple departments. This complexity not only lent itself to the risk of errors but also led to significant delays in delivering services to their customers, impacting overall customer satisfaction and, ultimately, bottlenecking and choking the sales process.
Camunda: The key to complex process orchestration
In November 2019, EDF embarked on a journey with Camunda to address these challenges. Camunda is a process orchestration and decision automation solution that enables companies to design, automate, and improve processes and business operations, and by implementing Camunda, EDF aimed to create a unified view of their processes, simplify tasks for customer advisors, automate use cases, and reduce the time to market for new offers.
In his presentation, Alexis discusses how the integration of Camunda at EDF facilitated the connection between teams and allowed for the optimization of existing use cases. Teams could now gather around a single, visual model of a process, making it easier for both IT and non-IT personnel to understand and communicate more effectively. According to Alexis, this visual model became the standard for process documentation within EDF, fostering a shared understanding and eliminating the need for countless team meetings.
“Since initiating our partnership with Camunda in 2019, we have successfully implemented it in more than 20 new and existing use cases. In some cases, Camunda’s process orchestration has been integrated across the entire workflow, while in others, it has been applied to specific tasks, really showing its ongoing versatility and impact on our operations…”
Alexis Madelin, Product Owner BPM, EDF.
Monitoring with Camunda Optimize
EDF also utilized Camunda Optimize for global supervision of their processes. Optimize provided EDF with a simpler and more unified dashboard compared to their previous tools. This level of supervision ensured that all stakeholders had access to real-time data and consistent reporting, leading to faster and more informed decision-making.
Camunda Optimize offers advantages for organizations like EDF who are looking to gain a more holistic understanding and enhancement of their process orchestration. It provides a clear visualization of end-to-end process intelligence and analytics, enabling businesses to define and measure KPIs effectively from the outset. This level of visibility facilitates strategic conversations between business and IT stakeholders, aligning process improvement with organizational goals. With expressive dashboards that are easy to create and interpret, Optimize turns process data into strategic and actionable insights, offering tools for benchmarking, monitoring, analyzing, and evaluating processes.
“With the insights provided by Camunda Optimize, we now have precise data on customer payment behaviors, including who has paid, who hasn’t, and if an issue was encountered. This visibility enables us to tailor our customer support, optimizing the interaction whether it occurs online or through direct engagement with customer advisors.”
Powerful analysis capabilities, such as process heatmaps, branch, outlier analysis, and machine learning-ready datasets, empower companies like EDF to focus on the most impactful opportunities for improvement. Additionally, Camunda Optimize enhances collaboration by sharing real-time, data-backed insights through customizable dashboards and notifications, ensuring that all stakeholders are informed and equipped to optimize process performance and address bottlenecks effectively.
Return on investment and improvements
Since adopting Camunda, EDF has seen significant improvements in its contracting process. As the first part of the business to implement Camunda, the residential market witnessed the development of an expert team that could share their experience across other projects and directions within EDF. Alexis discussed how more than 20 new and existing use cases have since been implemented with Camunda, further demonstrating the platform’s flexibility and effectiveness.
“Using process management to reduce time, like reconnection of unpaid services going from days to just 15 minutes, we’ve significantly improved client satisfaction and operational efficiency. This lets us respond to our customers more interactively online, providing opportunities to optimize further and introduce additional services.”
One specific use case involving the automatic re-establishment of electricity for customers who had previously failed to pay their bills showcased significant orchestration benefits. Before the implementation of Camunda, customers would commonly experience delays of several days before their electricity was reconnected. With Camunda, the process was reduced to less than 15 minutes, drastically improving customer satisfaction and retention and optimizing the company’s revenue collection.
Moving ahead
EDF’s journey with Camunda is far from over. The business market has also started to work with Camunda, and many more use cases are expected to be implemented throughout the year. This will involve migrating existing use cases to new platforms and the opportunity to revisit processes to determine if Camunda can further enhance its execution or supervision.
Alexis’s CamundaCon Berlin presentation makes for essential viewing as he shares his insights into how EDF, one of the true energy giants, has successfully streamlined its contracting process. The integration of Camunda at EDF has been a transformative experience, with the platform proving to be a powerful tool for their process optimization and orchestration. For EDF, this has resulted in quicker turnaround times, improved customer service, clearer process visibility, significant operational efficiencies, and, ultimately, acts as a compelling example of how leveraging the right technology to drive process improvements can achieve a robust bottom-line impact for the energy sector.
Start the discussion at forum.camunda.io