SEEBURGER Business Integration

In Touch with Tomorrow

Market Communication at Uniper

The digitization of the energy industry is connecting market participants more and more. It also poses challenges, as in the case of Uniper. After the legal separation from E.ON, Uniper faced the task of creating a new IT systems landscape. Uniper was looking for a future-proof and easy to use solution for exchanging information in a regulated market. The key objective was to ensure the safe and regulated delivery of 272,000,000,000 kWh of gas and 41,000,000,000 kWh of electricity to homes and businesses throughout Europe.

Futureproofing Market Communication

Uniper examined various scenarios for the implementation of its market communication. The most important requirement was that a market proven solution was to be introduced within the project. All while the project’s duration was limited to only three months. Other important aspects were the user interface and a reduction of operational expenditures. After analyzing various vendors, Uniper chose SEEBURGER’s Markt Kommunikation (MaKo) Cloud solution.

Industry:
Utilities
 

Scenarios:
Cloud Services
 

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SEEBURGER’s solution reduces our operating expenditures by a half compared to previous years. Even more important, it frees the department of time consuming tasks. We can now focus on the important tasks at hand, while the MaKo Cloud handles the rest in an automated fashion. It is a tremendous help in day to day business.

Michal Eick, Sales Solutions & Trading at Uniper

Why Keep Business Complicated?

SEEBURGER‘s Cloud Service reduces user interaction to a bare minimum. The exchange of transactions happens in the background. In the event of technical issues, a backlog is generated and reduced once the issues have been sorted out. This helps to keep the attention of the users free and focused on the important tasks of day to day business. Any error messages are reliably processed and displayed in monitoring. The solution also takes proactive care of the exchange of certificates and the onboarding of partners. This gives Uniper more time for important business processes.

The Future of Market Communication Has Begun

The implementation of the solution started in August 2018. The technical connection needed to fulfilled Uniper‘s high IT security requirements. This turned out to be tricky, since a direct connection to the billing system was not possible. To resolve the issue the API Management solution provided by Microsoft’s Azure Cloud was chosen. It is already used across the company and functions as the central platform for communication from the ERP system. Individual requirements were implemented in parallel on the cloud solution. After the successful onboarding of the market partners, the go-live took place on December 3, 2018. The solution has been in operation since then.

Project Details:

  • Project time: three months from start to go-live
  • Connected partners: initially over 2,000 market partners
  • Amount of Messages: around 200,000 messages per month
  • Connection: on customer request via Microsoft Azure Cloud API gateway (Cloud to Cloud)
  • Extras:
    • Direct integration to SAP monitoring tool (SEEBURGER Utilities Process Cockpit)
    • Implementation of various individual requirements (formats, processes)
    • Enhanced routing functionalities for incoming and outgoing messages
    • Automatic certificate handling and partner onboarding

The Decision For a User Friendly Solution

The SEEBURGER MaKo Cloud Solution won Unipers trust for various reasons:

  • SEEBURGER being the market leader for market communication and data integration
  • High level standardization through integration into standard ERP systems
  • Standardized mappings of typical market communication formats
  • Innovative Cloud Service with many additional functions (e.g. mail dispatch, splitting, partner and certificate management)
  • Efficient onboarding function for all market partners
  • Provision of an additional monitoring solution for SAP IS-U
  • 24/7 technical operation of the solution by SEEBURGER
  • No customer effort required for format changes or certificate handling
  • No dedicated customer team is necessary for operation

About Uniper

Uniper is an energy company based in Düsseldorf, Germany. Uniper was formed by the separation of E.ON’s fossil fuel assets into a separate company that began operations on 1 January 2016. The company employs about 12,000 employees in over 40 countries. Around one third of the employees are based in Germany.

The Uniper Group, which comprises of Uniper SE and its subsidiaries, bundles conventional energy generation including hydropower , global energy trading and electricity generation in Russia as well as energy storage in its portfolio.

www.uniper.energy