Enhancing the performance of a UK electricity network through a holistic solution

UK Power Networks is the UK’s largest electricity distribution business, supplying power to more than 18 million customers across London and the east and south east of England.

In April 2013, UK Power Networks embarked on a five-year journey to transform its entire business, focusing on improving data quality and governance, enhancing operational performance, reducing costs and delivering superior asset planning.

Enzen was chosen as UK Power Networks’ partner for the Business Transformation Programme (BTP). Their objectives were to achieve the highest regulatory standards, optimise business processes, achieve better customer service and deliver operational excellence for UK Power Networks by 2019. This would ultimately provide power consumers in the UK Power Networks region a better value, more reliable and higher quality service.

The BTP was a hugely ambitious transformation programme. In total, it meant transforming end-to-end processes and defining a common way to deliver and complete work across all of them. This entailed engaging and training thousands of people in several locations, rolling out mobile devices across the business, optimising hundreds of legacy systems and migrating millions of asset records into SAP.

To deliver the programme, Enzen applied its Zen Business Transformation Framework, a holistic, customised solution specifically designed to achieve positive, sustainable change for large utility organisations.

The holistic solution works across five different layers of an organisation: ie. the business process layer, the organisation layer, the people and culture layer, the data layer and the technology layer. Across these layers, the framework applies specific solutions to achieve the target business outcomes, while recognising the interconnectedness of each solution across the layers. At the same time, the unique challenges of the UK Power Networks environment were accounted for in the solution.

UK Power Networks and Enzen achieved the following outcomes during the course of the BTP:

• Indirect costs reduced by 20%
• Operational costs reduced by 5%
• Maintenance costs reduced by 20%
• Business support process cycle times reduced by 40%.

Since 2013, the business performance of UK Power Networks has increased across multiple areas, delivering tangible benefits to its customers, employees and shareholders. Analysis showed that during the course of the BTP, UK Power Networks achieved:

• the lowest number of lost time incidents per 100 employees than any other Distribution Network Operator
• the lowest average domestic distribution costs
• a decreasing number of customer interruptions and customer minutes lost
• an increasing service quality score as measured by Ofgem.