Case Study
New tariff management application automated manual processes at utility services company
OUR CLIENT
To accelerate the path to clean energy, this client provides software solutions to help utility companies develop new environmentally-conscious products and services. The company employs several hundred people, and its applications serve nearly 20 million residential and commercial customers.
THE CHALLENGE
Energy industry software company wanted to automate manual processes for tariff management
The client wanted to find a software engineering partner with deep energy and utility industry expertise to help design, build, deploy, and maintain a tariff management application. The project team needed extensive institutional knowledge about tariff management processes to ensure the new solution would help streamline, automate, and enhance workflows. Given the critical nature of utilities, the implementation project could not disrupt the normal business flow.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Software engineering team designed automated solution, deployed off-shore development office
UST kicked off an application development initiative with an extensive discovery effort to understand existing tariff management processes, workflows, applications, and interdependencies. The team meticulously documented detailed institutional knowledge from employees about manual processes and designed an automation plan to enhance and streamline workflows in the new application suite.
Within six months, the UST team created an off-shore development center in India that quickly grew to a highly functional product engineering team. In just a couple of months, the development center began releasing application functionality following agile DevOps processes and CI/CD best practices. The software engineers also followed robust multi-tiered DevOps governance policies to mitigate and resolve issues, protect data security and intellectual property, and ensure rapid, high-quality code delivery.
THE IMPACT
New application generated huge time and cost savings for the company
With the off-shore application development project in full swing, the company reduced software engineering costs by 30%—with no disruption to the business during the project implementation. Functionally, the new automated tariff management processes shaved five minutes off each processed invoice. This resulted in the company’s invoicing team saving nearly 170 hours of productivity each month.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/productengineering
https://www.ust.com/en/ust-product-engineering/softwareproductengineering