Data Landscape Assessment – E&C Consultants

E&C is an energy procurement consulting firm that assists its customers in energy contracting, energy risk management, energy controlling, energy data management and decarbonisation energy management.

More and more companies set decarbonisation goals due to the occurring energy transition. E&C helps its customer to make a better corporate energy transition by applying smart energy procurement practices and mitigating the risk of fluctuating energy prices.

The briefing

To advise their customers, E&C developed advanced calculations, combining data from markets, energy consumption, contracts, and other sources.

Given the complexity of energy contracts, a great deal of custom input was required to support all variations. Excel was the tool of choice for their calculations, supported by internal and very knowledgeable VBA experts who did this job perfectly. This also supported one of the key strengths of E&C, being its flexibility towards their customers. Data was stored on-premises in a SQL Server database. SharePoint was used as a document library and presentation layer in combination with Power BI.

However, given the rapid growth of E&C as a company and of the data itself, the on-premises architecture imposed restrictions for the future. E&C wanted to assess the current set-up and gain knowledge how to optimise their architecture and make it more future proof.

Main goals of the assessment:

• Insight in AS IS situation of the current data architecture
• Advise on what the data architecture should look like for better performance (TO BE situation)
• GAP Analysis and proposed roadmap
• Possible improvements to the database model
• Possible improvements to the Power BI data model and Power BI reports

Our solution

We conducted a thorough data assessment to help E&C gain insight in their current data architecture and identify possibilities for optimisation.

The data assessment was an iterative and informative process between Cloubis and E&C based on intense collaboration and co-creation.

We used the following approach to effectively run the assessment:

1. The first step in the process was getting a general picture of the AS IS architecture via different workshops during which we wanted to get an idea of what E&C does and how that translates into the data. Also, E&C had the chance to share experiences, challenges and ask all burning questions they had at that time.
2. After several workshops, we processed the information and prepared our initial assessment. This covered insights on cloud infrastructure, data warehouse and data modelling concepts and how to bring their data architecture to a modern and future proof data platform. We also included reporting in our scope, explaining solutions on data preparation and publishing within the Power BI platform.
3. Next, we delivered a technology proposal. We compared different Data Warehouse and Data Integration services and made a recommendation on which technology would be best fitted for E&C. This was again presented to the steering group and a detailed report was delivered.
4. As a final step, we proposed an architecture based on the chosen Data Warehouse and Data Integration tools. We presented our proposition and shared the report.

Each presentation was followed by a separate Q&A-session during which E&C could ask all remaining questions regarding our architecture and technology propositions.

The outcome

At the end of the intense data assessment process, we were able to give E&C insight in their current architecture and share our expertise on an enhanced setup. We delivered well-supported propositions how E&C would be able to optimise their architecture and make it scalable for the future.

We did not leave E&C with our propositions. This thorough data assessment process appeared to be just the first chapter of an interesting collaboration between E&C and Cloubis.

After delivering our assessment, E&C decided to work with us on their data roadmap and to start implementing the propositions together.

With our help, E&C was able to change from an on-premises architecture, that worked well in the past but was reaching its limits, to a cloud-based and scalable architecture, that allows them to deliver their data and product roadmap for the future.