Client

British energy retailer supplying electricity and gas to millions of residential and business customers.

Business objectives

As part of a government-mandated smart meter rollout of roughly 53 million electric and gas meters across Great Britain, our client is responsible for deploying 5 million smart meters, for their 3.6 million customers, by 2024.  This involves a target deployment rate of 1.2 million meters per year, at peak, across different fuel types, meter types, and meter providers.

A rollout of this scale requires sophisticated meter order forecasting and supply planning, to keep in step with meter deployment commitments. The consequences of not getting this right include higher inventory costs, asset rental costs, suboptimal working capital utilization, stock outage costs, customer dissatisfaction, and potential regulatory penalties.

Our client needed the capability to produce highly accurate asset order forecasts and procurement plans at the lowest granularity level.

How Wipro delivered client success

• Wipro developed an advanced analytics solution to generate optimized asset order forecasts for different meter types, fuel types, and meter asset providers (MAPs).  The algorithm modelled various parameters and constraints, such as meter deployment profiles, meter demand forecasts, stocking levels, contract lead times, storage and delivery limitations, non-delivery history, transportation inefficiencies, and other variables.  
• Optimization techniques provide supply plans by minimizing cost parameters while considering technical, operational, and financial constraints. For instance, capacity plans and thresholds (related to workforce and logistics) were considered possible input constraints while reducing storage costs.
• Scenario modelling and what-if analysis enable the business to model the impact of continuously changing supply, demand, and inventory cost data. The solution also enables comparing multiple scenarios and setting an optimized baseline plan. 
• KPI reporting helps visualize trends and patterns and identify root cause of issues.

Wipro developed this analytics solution on the SAS Grid analytics platform.

Business impact:

A unified planning capability generates smart meter order forecasts by considering all aspects across deployment, supply, inventory, and finance. The solution is expected to deliver cumulative risk mitigation of £2.82 - £4.23 million and a cost avoidance potential of £1.34 - £2.02 million, through the five-year deployment plan.