Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 7TH - 13TH SEPTEMBER 2018 | 21 Operations & Assets Jerry White, operation CIO, Thames Digital, Thames Water A year aer the water market opened for business and following a lot of feedback from trading parties we have concluded that several significant and common problems exist with the way requests for market services are made and transacted between retailers and wholesalers through 'bilateral processes'. Despite many of the wholesale trading parties having invested in technology to offer self-service application solutions – oen through an internet portal – there has been little common approach, resulting in a complex set of technology variants. This makes it extremely difficult for retailers to engage effectively, repeatedly and without error on behalf of their customers, and oen results in rejection of requests by wholesalers and, ultimately, delays to the delivery of service to the end customer. A technology solution has been proposed by MOSL and the DSC. This features a central solution allowing exchange of requests between retailers and wholesalers in a consistent manner and could also be a platform for sharing information, market data, analysis and providing additional services to trading parties and even end-customers. The benefits to a wholesaler could be: • Easier and more consistent applications for services will reduce errors for wholesalers to process, reducing handling time and costs within the wholesale market teams and improving the speed of service delivery and retailer/ customer satisfaction. • The solution will enable integration with wholesale technology investments and allow better retailer experience without significant investment write off. • A better and more consistent subscription-based solution should allow improved ease of access to the market for new retail entrants, allowing wholesalers to manage their diverse retailer base. • A central solution could provide a platform for wholesalers to offer additional services to the market and could provide a more centralised option for sharing data – GIS [geographic information system] data for meter locations – and communications between parties – details of service interruptions during incidents. Nathan Morgan, waterline development and AMR manager, Waterscan At present, market forms and communications are delivered through bespoke wholesaler bilateral solu- tions and retailers and self- suppliers must adapt to a multitude of different form completion meth- ods, processes once forms are submitted and varying outcomes, dependant on which wholesaler region that the end user is located. Retailers and self-suppliers also experi- ence differing detail, regularity and format of reporting of bilateral SLA [service level agreement] performance from wholesal- ers. This acts as a barrier to understanding wholesale performance across the market, learning best practice and implementing this knowledge with other wholesalers, to ensure end users receive a consistently high level of service no matter where their busi- ness is located. The proposed bilateral solution offers retailers, self-suppliers and wholesalers a range of benefits that will enable productivity gains, data quality improvements and an improved end user experience. It will provide a simplified bilateral process for retailers and self- suppliers, with only a single portal to administer user access for and train staff to use, as well as the ability to use APIs [application program interfaces] to connect for system-to-system bilateral transactions. Integration of the market data set from CMOS [central market operating system] into the bilateral hub will improve the quality and completeness of data being submitted through bilateral forms by retailers and self-suppliers. This will reduce rejection rates of bilateral forms from wholesalers and prevent unnecessary re-submission of forms by retailers and self-suppliers. A centralised database of bilaterals will permit standardised reporting of wholesaler performance against market SLAs, allowing comparisons to be made and trends identified. From this analysis, retailers and self-suppliers will be able to work with wholesalers to improve and achieve the highest level of performance for end-users. Waterscan believes the bilateral solution will allow us to focus on improving the experience of end users, rather than struggling with the administrative burden of the current, compartmentalised structure of multiple wholesale portals. Darren Thresh, business liaison manager, Yorkshire Water We must be mindful that the main communication mechanism that exists between retail and wholesale participants is the bilateral forms and processes defined by the operational terms within the codes. These are standard processes and arguably should never have been removed from the scope of the central market solution, which allowed diversification across the wholesale landscape. Yorkshire Water implemented its bilateral solution – C&C's SWIMPool – at the very start of shadow operations, six months before the opening of the market, but resist- ance to use was experienced at early con- tract stages with retailers who were looking to develop customer levels in the Yorkshire area. Of course, Yorkshire Water was only one of the wholesalers, which were all buy- ing or building solutions to the same local problem: how do we offer this service? The segregated nature of the wholesale responses has created the frustration that retailers face now. Each wholesaler has a different solution and technically integrating with all wholesaler solutions to drive efficiency would be extremely expensive. We must remember, though, that some forms are wholesaler-initiated. The ability to push notifications to each affected retailer during major incidents would also be of great value. The current DSC bilateral initiative will certainly remove the frustrations that surround the use of so many wholesaler portals, enhance the retail-user experience, and standardise operational performance reporting across the market. More importantly, however, the initiative will improve the mechanisms by which retailers and wholesalers collaborate to deliver excellent service to our customers. Establishing a solution that provides all retailers and wholesalers a single experience offers great market efficiency. Of course, trading parties with high volume requirements for these forms should also be able to make a single investment decision to automate and integrate their back office solutions with a single hub to access all other trading parties. "Each wholesaler has a different solution and technically integrating with all wholesaler solutions to drive efficiency would be extremely expensive."

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