EDF transforms SAP data into gold

Electricité de France has successfully implemented and optimized a solution for rapid extraction of SAP data for customer insight purposes. Working with internal business customers and information systems experts, the Analytical CRM Department has created KPIs that give the giant much greater market flexibility. 

France's leading utility prepares for the open market
Electricité de France (EDF) is one of the world’s largest utilities, with nearly 30 million customers in France and 15 million outside, and 2005 revenues exceeding €50 billion. EDF was state-owned until 2004. Like other former state monopolies, the biggest challenge facing EDF is the open market: EDF needs to compete in a fully liberalized environment by 2007. 

“Our main objective is not to win new customers, but rather to retain as many as possible by improving our service,” says Philippe Futtersack, Project Manager in the Analytical CRM Department at EDF. The department was set up in 2002 to serve internal customers in six business departments, including sales, marketing and financial control. Its responsibility is to identify where relevant data can be found within EDF, cleansing it and integrating external source data, and scoring customers, for example, according to their loyalty, profitability, lifetime value and the relevance of new commercial offers. It must also ensure that EDF has the necessary tools to meet evolving marketing needs. 

“You cannot compete in an open market unless you understand your customers,” says Mr. Futtersack. “So in 2004 we started an all-or-nothing project to deliver customer insight for the mass market, starting with small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The survival of the company depended on it.”

EDF has rich sources of information, particularly about the top-level customer segments, but that is not enough in itself. “Analytical CRM needs to coexist with information systems, but really the approaches are very different. Our main function is to score customers and give overviews of the market structure, whereas the information systems approach is more interested in individual transactions and reporting aggregates,” says Mr. Futtersack. “There are a lot of gaps in the information that have to be filled through SAS analytics, to turn it into true market and customer intelligence, and to make it meaningful for managers. And that is where my department comes in.” 

The challenge to provide these integrated customer views was especially difficult as the information systems were also in transition, with customer records being migrated from 2004 onwards to an SAP system. “We had the same customers appearing in different systems. So we had to consolidate and de-duplicate some information.”

The SAP system currently contains 300,000 SME records. This will steadily increase to 2 million, but ultimately 27 million SME and household customer records will be on SAP – a huge amount of data. In the meantime, Mr. Futtersack’s team has to provide customer insights based on moving, evolving data without disturbing the integrity of the transactional systems – which, as Mr. Futtersack points out, is no easy task. 

“SAP places strong limits on accessing its data, which also presented a challenge. We were committed to SAP for transactional applications, but on the other hand, we were committed to SAS for our intelligence strategy. So we benchmarked SAS9 in mid-2005 on its speed of access to SAP and other source data, and we were very satisfied with the results,” says Mr. Futtersack. “We concluded that SAS could extract any SAP data very rapidly. It is more robust and more scalable than the alternatives. Project synergies between EDF and its partners SAS and Bull helped to secure the right infrastructure through benchmarking and optimization,” he adds. In the tests, EDF achieved a 30 percent improvement in the time taken to extract 500 GB of SAP data, from six hours to four and a quarter hours. 

KPIs on the move
Using SAS, Mr. Futtersack’s analysts can overcome many layers of data complexity to provide coherent key performance indicators (KPIs) to its internal customer departments, for example, indicating trends in electricity consumption and demand, revenues, costs and profitability within the various Tier 1 and mass market – SME and household – customer segments, and by sales channel. This enables EDF to target customers for profitable new commercial offers. “With scoring, we can focus marketing efforts on the customers who are most likely to find the new offers appealing, so we can migrate customers up to 15 percent more cost-effectively,” says Mr. Futtersack. 

Internal customers in financial control use similar analysis to optimize costs and financial results. “The main benefit of SAS is that it can generate metrics for new KPIs for different functions far faster than using a traditional information systems approach,” says Mr. Futtersack. “And this is of critical strategic importance as the company becomes market-driven.” 

“There are also important benefits for EDF customers. The information we are providing enables EDF to improve its offers according to customer requirements, to better allocate resources for new commercial activity and to improve services. For example, we are decreasing call centre response times by up to 10 percent by identifying what are the most important and time-consuming questions from our customers.” 

“We are also localizing our approach to customer service, supporting EDF’s goal of greater commercial flexibility through regional autonomy by providing better business intelligence,” says Mr. Futtersack. 

The project has been a complex one, involving the creation of KPIs in a very fluid environment and collaboration between business departments, analysts and information systems experts. “SAS is helping us to adapt to market realities by giving us customer insight and an overview of our business that we never had before,” concludes Mr. Futtersack.

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