What are the biggest challenges when it comes to managing data?

1. Overcomplicated systems

Managing and handling large data streams is one of the biggest bottlenecks that both energy suppliers and other energy related companies are facing right now. These energy companies rely on large, overcomplicated systems that lack transparency and eventually turn into a blackbox system. This makes it harder for your company to anticipate on major problems that lie ahead and will eventually slow down the speed at which you can operate, it will also affect your company from pivoting on key strategic moments. Most importantly, it’s not a future proof solution, because the IT resources you require to remove these issues out of the system are going to drive up the operational costs for energy suppliers.

2. Integration Hell

Within the energy market, data is king, because it’s the foundation you use to create invoices, provide breakthrough insights, and manage client contracts. That’s why you might be just as shocked as us when we noticed most energy companies are still using different information silo systems to collect data in individual silos. This makes it impossible to:

• Understand and use your data
• Integrate all your data on a large scale

3. The challenge to innovate

The fact that most energy suppliers have an inability to pivot and change their strategy due to these blackbox information systems, leads us directly to the third challenge. Firstly, energy suppliers quickly lose the primary focus on the customer because they are so busy fixing errors within the information systems. Lastly, it’s going to be a big investment to innovate your products and services when you’re reallocating developers and resources to manage said systems.

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The byNeuron Design Principles

Recently we discovered an important breakthrough in the strategies used by energy companies. We are talking about a paradigm shift here, because these companies are adopting a more product-focused approach. This means that business processes are becoming more productized and standardized.

Product Driven

For example, energy suppliers who are looking to set-up contracts with their prospects need a standardized proposition but might want to keep the flexibility to tailor specific parameters based on each prospects needs. Because of this, the byNeuron platform is designed to be product driven: you maintain flexibility from the moment you reach out with your proposition all the way to the operational follow-up and invoicing.

The benefit here is that you’re able to innovate propositions at a faster pace, boosting commercial success and reducing the cost-to-serve.

Data Driven

Business requirements can change rapidly, just like the relationships with clients and service partners or by adding new components to the product configuration. Long story short, this gives developers an increased workload when they change and test new product configurations. The byNeuron platform is designed around this data driven mindset, the platform gives users the possibility to easily change product-and process configurations on the platform itself.

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Process Driven

Companies are led forward through business processes, like sales-and accounting processes, it’s important that you’re able to manage and observe them, find the root cause of the problem and pinpoint exactly what went wrong. This is going to drastically improve the efficiency of your company and avoid any blackbox situations, due to complicated information systems. To give users a better understanding on how a business process works, the byNeuron ENERGY platform visualizes each process as a chain of different blocks. Issues are easily noticed within each process because users can pinpoint to the individual step that causes the problem.

User Centric

Systems for energy suppliers can become complicated because of the large amounts of data and business processes. Making user experience the fourth key component of the byNeuron ENERGY platform. Imagine you’re on the phone with an important client, you want to be able to easily access all client information like invoices, contracts, and complaints. Having these types of client-, asset or site data accessible at your fingertips, gives both experienced and lesser experienced users a proper way to service the customer in an informed and correct manner.

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