The disruptive Energy & Utilities sector billing solution to increase performance, scalability and reliability at significantly lower costs

Challenges for companies in the Energy & Utilities sector

The Energy & Utilities world is increasingly engaged in the numerous challenges that the market continually proposes. Digitalization, the pressure of competitors and the drive towards sustainability in all its aspects, environmental-economic-social, have initiated a profound rethinking of business processes by companies, which will certainly continue in the future.

All this implies the need to optimize both the services aimed at customers, trying to offer rapid, complete and intuitive customer experiences, and back-office activities.
Analyzing back-office transformation needs from a technological point of view, the challenge for companies is to have flexible and lean applications that reduce implementation and maintenance costs, effectively supporting all those processes that customers do not see but which are fundamental for the provision of services.
In fact, this approach frees up human and economic resources to invest in new areas and business opportunities and drive innovation in the sector.

youtiverse as an opportunity to introduce disruptive innovation at advantageous costs

A path also undertaken by Fincons and Italgas who spoke about their collaborative experience that led to a disruptive rethinking of how to manage the meter to cash processes according to an innovative and sustainable approach, during the Utility Day, the main Italian event dedicated to the in-depth analysis of trends affecting the energy ecosystem.

As explained by Marco Barra Caracciolo, Chairman and CEO of Bludigit, Italgas’ Digital Company, the analysis of the investment and maintenance costs of internal information systems revealed an opportunity for efficiency in back-office applications. In particular, the company focused on the remaking of the billing system, a challenging project both in terms of complexity and economic and organizational impact.

However, the comparative analysis of vertical billing solutions available on the market did not reveal any market solution able to allow a radical improvement in the management of processes while guaranteeing savings in both the adoption and maintenance phases.

On this basis, an exchange was born between Italgas and Fincons, which as a system integrator with a Business Unit dedicated to the Energy & Utilities sector with solid experience and skills in the field, proposed to develop youtiverse, a completely different solution compared to traditional ones on the market.

The distinctive and innovative features of the youtiverse solution

A microservices cloud platform in which business users become the protagonists and are able to independently manage and modify the logic and calculation algorithms through intuitive interfaces, making themselves independent from IT structures.
With this new system, the calculation rules, which in traditional billing systems are managed at code level, become easily accessible and manageable for the business user who is put in the best conditions to make them evolve over time based on business or regulatory requirements. This is an innovative and disruptive approach that allows the user to view the input data, the applied micro rule and the output data for full control of the process.

To optimize integration with front-end systems, a highly modular and extendable-to- new-services open platform, based on API and web service, was created. Moreover, in order to automate repetitive and low-value-added activities, such as the reading and handling of tickets, as much as possible, extensive use was made of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.

The project is in the launch phase but it has already been able to realize significant advantages, considering that in just 12 months, the time in which the platform was created, 18 years of Italgas' billing history were also migrated, configuring all calculation algorithms since 2003 in the system. The platform will therefore not only be able to manage billing for the more than 8 million Italgas PDRs but also, if necessary, to re-analyze the historical data calculated from 2003 to today.

Fincons-Italgas: a winning collaboration that looks to the future

This has been a positive experience of innovation between Italgas and Fincons which has shown that a different and sustainable way of managing billing by putting the user at the heart of processes is possible.
However, the two companies do not intend to stop here and are already working to continue and evolve their collaboration, both to support the billing of other services, such as water distribution, and to expand the processes supported by the solution for end-to-end management of all processes in youtiverse

Are you interested in learning more about the new youtiverse platform?