Energy industry

Barré solutions for power plants, DSOs and TSOs

In the 21st century, the energy industry is undergoing a major renewal. Drivers of change are the increasing focus on sustainability, security of supply issues due to overpopulation and urbanization, and the integration of more sustainable renewable energy sources into the supply system. These changes are pervasive across the industry and are being driven by a number of key technology trends, one of the most important of which is the digitalization of the energy industry. Energy production, trading, transmission, and distribution, including transmission system operation, is now unthinkable without digital tools, and digital solutions are fundamentally reshaping the way some areas operate alongside or complementing traditional energy solutions.

Barré Technologies’ solutions for content management, business process management and data analytics have proven their usefulness in areas ranging from conventional and nuclear power generation to transmission system operation and energy distribution. The energy industry has traditionally been a highly regulated industry, with strict rules for energy activities being overseen by a number of regulatory bodies. Auditability requires the use of document management and storage solutions that are continuously operational, auditable, centrally managed, and reliable. Furthermore, as the “de facto” standard of the industry, the centralized document delivery of SAP ERP and SAP ISU systems for gas and electricity distribution is an additional requirement, as is the need to archive and process mass incoming and outgoing invoices. Our IBM FileNet-based document management solutions have proven to be ideally suited for these purposes and contribute to achieving efficient case management alongside audit compliance.

During the COVID pandemic, the energy industry, like other industries, was forced to accelerate the digitalization of its administrative processes due to increased telecommuting and remote customer management expectations. Barré Technologies Zrt. has developed IT solutions based on IBM Business Automation Workflow and IBM DataCap technologies to accelerate case management, regulatory and approval processing, as well as the acceptance of technical documents, among others. Customer satisfaction, resource utilization and management control have been significantly improved by speeding up case throughput.

Nowadays, the energy industry is beginning to use and exploit the technical data of its own mass consumer, generation, and distribution networks. Rapid management- decision making is no longer possible without up-to-date, well-prepared, and accurate business data, and new generations of managers are expected to be able to self-serve reporting, i.e., to analyze individual business-related data independently without IT experts. Our company’s energy big data warehouse solutions, built on IBM technologies, contribute to the ability to serve group-wide reporting of across different companies and applications with a unified self-service BI platform. With the development of self-service BI-based reporting at the enterprise group level, IT exposure to application vendors is reduced, the lead time to serve each new reporting need is continuously reduced as the data warehouse expands, and the time to implementation is shortened – as end users only need to be aware of one reporting interface.