Lancelot ETRM: Multi-commodity trading system at innogy

Unicorn deployed the latest generation of its multi-commodity product solution, Lancelot ETRM, designed to cover and consolidate the gas and electricity trading agenda, at innogy.

Furthermore, the company carried out a significant technological upgrade and consolidation of Retail Energy Management systems built on the Lancelot platform, resulting in a marked simplification of business processes and a change to the operation model, and consequently in operational savings.

Initial State

Before the project implementation, the Lancelot application portfolio ran in multiple isolated application environments (virtual servers):

ETS / PNEE / REMIT EE – application environment including Energy Trading System, consecutive purchasing of electricity, and REMIT reporting

Web Portal –
environment containing the web portal for consecutive purchasing and portfolio management

RPM / PNZP / REMIT ZP – application environment including gas Retail Portfolio Management gas, consecutive purchasing of gas, and REMIT reporting for gas

NPS –
environment with Nomination and Prediction System application - forecasting, nominations and portfolio management

ML –
environment with an intermediate layer between the consecutive purchasing backend and web portal for end users

The operation in dedicated application environments was quite costly. Some parts of the solution employed legacy technology, the maintenance of which was no longer sustainable.

In their work, users used individual applications instead of a centralised solution. Also, because of changes to innogy’s business processes (e.g. customer valuation under electricity portfolio management), it was necessary to review some of the application functionalities.

Our Solution

The consolidated solution is built upon the latest generation of the Lancelot platform, covering the following functional areas for both gas and electricity:

Portfolio management and consumption forecasting
Offer evaluation
Consecutive purchase – including a web portal for end customers
ETRM module
REMIT transparency publication

Users access the trading application through a thin client. The part of the solution used by innogy’s internal users runs in a consolidated virtual environment. For security reasons, the web portal for end customers runs separately.

Technology

Business modules were delivered as implementations of a standard product, Lancelot ETRM, which employs the HTML5 technology and Unicorn Application Framework components.

The remaining parts of the solution have been built on the Lancelot platform, designed to work with large volumes of data in time series. The platform also includes a powerful computing engine with approximately 150 predefined computing functions and a thick MS.NET client.

Results of the Project

The project built a single consolidated system covering the business processes of portfolio management, pricing, consecutive purchase, consumption forecasting, and trading for both electricity and gas suppliers. During the project, Unicorn and innogy focussed on optimising the existing business processes to maximise the customer’s trading efficiency.

In this multi-commodity product, Lancelot ETRM, innogy has acquired a powerful tool to support its gas and electricity trading.

Unicorn provided the end-to-end systems integration of trading process across innogy’s IT environment. The delivery also included integration of the consolidated system to its surrounding systems (OTE, YR.NO, ČHMÚ, EEX, PXE, SAP).

Benefits

Building a consolidated system, providing users with access to all features.

Introducing a thin client, allowing access from any device connected to the internal LAN/VPN.

Reducing operational costs due to a drop in the number of virtual servers running.

Reviewing and simplifying business processes.

Providing support for the 15-minute trading sample and later support for this granularity of balancing within the balancing zone.

Ensuring sustainability by migrating from the legacy solution to the next-generation technology.

Who is our customer

innogy Czech Republic

innogy’s business revolves around delivering natural gas, electricity, and heat to customers, heat and power generation in heating plants, and clean mobility solutions. In the Czech Republic, innogy is a leading natural gas supplier for businesses and households. The company also generates heat and sells electricity. It offers several advanced energy services and products while focusing on innovation, sustainability, and clean mobility.

„innogy ČR chose Unicorn to deliver a solution fully meeting its requirements for a new Retail Energy Management System. With the innovated Lancelot platform and detailed knowledge of innogy’s environment and processes, our joint efforts managed to eliminate unnecessary functionalities from the original solution, tweak the existing business processes and implement new ones, thus simplifying the work for end users. The implemented product, Lancelot ETRM, has successfully met our need to consolidate trading across commodities, becoming an integral part of our mission-critical systems.”

Petr Prucha
Head of Retail Energy Management

Software is all around us –
it makes work easier, simplifies life
and promotes sustainability.

Contact for more info
Unicorn Systems a.s.
+420 221 400 111
info@unicorn.com

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