Solution: Customer Service
Product: BEA WebLogic Portal®
Industry: Utilities
Partner: Cambridge Technology Partners
Business Challenge:
Bewag Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, a subsidiary of the Swedish Vattenfall Group, is the third largest energy supplier in Germany. Bewag's largest customer group-approximately 3,000 businesses who use more than 400,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year-was challenged in managing their energy usage. These customers have numerous meters, typically across different physical sites, making it complicated to display their power consumption and billing details or their energy use plans. Bewag wanted to evolve its customer services processes for those commercial customers from a staff-intensive and disparate set of services that were complicated to navigate, to a self-service online portal that gives them a complete overview of their utility usage.
Solution
After evaluating numerous portal platforms, Bewag selected BEA WebLogic Portal as the standard for all its portal applications. The decision was based on BEA's ability to address a long list of criteria, beginning with BEA's unmatched support for standards, including Java. Bewag was confident that the BEA solutions architecture is particularly suitable and economical-for ensuring security, scalability, availability, and operational efficiency.
Results
The most notable benefits have been improvement in customer relations and in the efficiency of the Bewag employees who interact directly with customers. The customers who have access to the Portal are very satisfied. It has optimized both the ability for customers to serve themselves as well as the ability of the staff to focus on more value-added customer interactions. The 27-member employee team completed the implementation of the Major Customer Portal in five and a half-months. Because Bewag was able to address the requirements for phase 1 of the portal primarily with out-of-the-box features, developers
were able to get the site up and running very quickly and focus more effort on differentiated business logic.