Our client, a mid-sized retail power and gas company, requested that we review their existing internal systems to determine the viability of solutions and if there was cost justification to continue development. The annual development and support budget of their legacy systems was in excess of $1mm per year. Additionally, the client was unable to produce a daily P&L other than via spreadsheets.
After an exhaustive review of all areas of business processes for gas and power transactions, MidDel made the recommendation to create an RFP and send it to a wide selection of vendors. Areas of functionality were segmented and prioritized based on the needs of the business. MidDel worked with the client to measure the current in-house systems against the RFP, and coordinated and managed the RFP process with the vendors, thereby alleviating pressure on the users.
By ranking the current systems and spreadsheets against the RFP, it became clear that approximately 50% of the legacy systems should be replaced with third party software. The RFP was distributed and vendor demos were scheduled and managed by MidDel. Out of six vendors, two were short listed, and one was selected to proceed with a pilot. The decision to purchase the software was unanimous.
MidDel was also selected as the System Integrator. We were able to utilize the legacy applications that were customized for the retail business, including invoicing, and work with the client team to fully integrate those to the selected ETRM software. This was proven to be both a cost effective and stable approach, allowing the business to have complete transparency into daily operations and P&L reporting.
The savings as a result of this project are expected to exceed $15 mm over a ten year period.
