From paper orders to digital grid processes.

Energie 360° makes sustainable energy usable throughout Switzerland. 280 employees, together with customers, partners and communities, are committed to renewable energy and ecological mobility.

The company plans, builds and operates energy solutions, invests in electric charging stations and gas stations, and is a leading provider of biogas and wood pellets. This way, Energie 360° contributes daily to achieving the goals of the 2000-watt society.

Digitalisation has also reached Energie 360°. Employees in the network department perform numerous processes to ensure operational and supply security within Energie 360°’s network area. Rapid developments in digitalisation offer ever more opportunities for efficiency gains — as part of a project programme, Energie 360° decided to digitalise its grid processes over the coming years.

For the first project, three processes with significant synergy potential and a high number of process runs per year were selected: meter replacement, device inspection, and the maintenance of pressure reducing and metering stations on a 14-year inspection cycle.

Previously, technicians received their orders on paper and recorded the necessary data on those documents. Back-office employees then transferred the data into the system manually. Around 70% of process runs are standard cases suited to automated booking. The OPUSm service management solution now spares employees a substantial portion of these time-consuming steps: effort in pre- and post-processing drops, sources of error are eliminated — and the back-office team’s job profile becomes more engaging.

Energie 360° began with an inventory of the current processes. After a critical analysis, and taking strategic objectives into account, Energie 360° and OPUSm jointly developed the target process design.

Building on this, a technically demanding project connected the SAP FSM solution with the SAP Utilities solution, SAP IS-U, for the first time. Energie 360° executes these three processes around 7,000 times per year. Coordinating these assignments requires efficient planning that respects legally defined deadlines — a task now entrusted to the new SAP FSM technology.

Alessio De Monaco, Deputy Head of the Metering Operations team, praises the simplicity of the planning. SAP FSM also proves a significant help when the team faces staff absences: where documents previously had to be collected from headquarters, De Monaco now simply shifts an assignment in the system — the substitute employee has immediate access to all the information needed to carry out the task.

Project manager Nathalie Gyger is particularly convinced by the elimination of error sources and the increase in efficiency. Energie 360° also benefits from improved data quality thanks to ongoing master-data adjustment notifications. Technicians have all information and documents for a task available at any time on a single device. Automation of recurring process steps significantly reduced the back-office workload — the freed-up capacity flows into future-oriented initiatives.

Asked what advice she would give other customers facing similar challenges, project manager Nathalie Gyger recommends careful preparation — and advises against the classic waterfall approach in favour of a more agile way of working: “Strictly following the traditional project process loses a lot of time between initial conception and implementation due to a comprehensive specification. All project participants repeatedly have to reacquaint themselves with the topic. From our perspective, this leads to significant friction.”

For Energie 360°, investing in digitalised work processes has paid off multiple times. In their view, it is worth tackling such projects sooner rather than later.