CASE STUDY
Essent’s move to an agile business platform
Delivering a robust new business platform helped Essent energize its business and customer relationships
Challenge
Essent, the Netherlands’ largest energy company, supplies the gas, electricity, heat and energy services its clients need to sustain and grow their businesses.
While the company has a strong history of helping to grow communities in the Netherlands through the delivery of efficient, sustainable power, Essent is continuously looking for new ways to deliver added value to business clients. The company set out to establish and launch the Essent Business platform, a solution that could provide numerous potential benefits, including faster contract generation for business customers, simplified quote creation and better customer contact center support.
“The most important success factor in this project was actually the start of the project, where you agree on the scope you are going to deliver with the business. Other specific success factors which have helped determine the success of the project are the collaboration with the business. But the program management naturally also played an important role here.” Chief Information Officer for Essent.
Strategy and solution
Essent asked Accenture to manage the program from an Agile perspective. The utility wanted to deliver value based on a significant investment, but was challenged with a project that had yet to meet its objectives. Accenture helped Essent:
Identify and remove roadblocks to program success
Sorted blocks of scope into those that would have the greatest technical impact, business value, and architectural dependencies.
Create a physical blueprint in the team space
Developed a story map for each scope block and focused on delivering minimum viable products and achieving practical results.
Find efficiency and delivery opportunities
Held scrum team and core team meetings to identify new opportunities for improving efficiency and delivery.
Transformation
“Accenture has been very important to us, and we have opted for Accenture as a result of their expertise and their agile way of working; they have done everything in their power to realize this for us. Essent’s future looks very bright, we are simply back where we belong." Director of Operations, Essent.
Essent and Accenture delivered the business platform on time and budget, avoiding cost overruns and keeping the strength of the program's Agile vision intact. In addition to substantial growth in customers using the system, Essent has achieved:
83%
Customer satisfaction score
79%
Employee satisfaction score
75%
Reduction in the time required to draft contracts (from 40 minutes to 10 minutes)
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