Podcast - Robotic process automation 'could change the face of utility management'

Jonny: Chris can you tell me a bit about who you are and what exactly you do?

Yeah sure, Hi Jonny, my names Chris Hurcombe I’m the CEO for Catalyst, we are actually an award-winning energy consultancy business. 

As you mentioned we look at energy procurement and energy management services on behalf of business customers within the UK.  I have got over 20-years of industry experience within energy and all aspects, and my role here at Catalyst is I lead a team of energy consultants and data analysts.

Jonny: OK great thank you Chris, what about you Scott?

Hi Jonny, I have been the Chief Commercial Officer at Catalyst since August last year taking over the day to day evolution of our software platforms a long with managing our partners and alliance division and all commercial aspects of the business. 

But I have actually been a Director of the company for over 15-years.  Prior to joining Catalyst in a full-time capacity, I have spent 23-years in the technology sector, working for businesses owned by O2 and Vodafone before setting up a sister company to Catalyst called Cloud Everywhere. 

As MD of that business we transformed it into a market leading unified solutions provider before its sale in 2018.  I am now delighted to be working with Chris on a day to day basis continuing the fantastic work he has achieved over the last 18-years.

Jonny: OK perfect, so everyone knows who you are now, and our listeners will be on the same page.  So, Chris its exciting times for Catalyst, as you have this month launched a disruptive digital energy spend management platform, but before we talk more about that product itself could you tell me the motivation for bringing it to market.

Yeah sure, so I think really the making of it has been over 20-years, as the market becomes more complex each day it gets harder and harder for businesses and ourselves to keep track of energy spend. 

We have always been searching for new ideas and different solutions to common operational issues both for ourselves and for our customers.  We strive to really find new ways that we can add value to that working relationship.

For years we have asked ourselves essentially how we can remove the manual and semi-automated labour-intensive processes that really plagued this energy industry for that kind of good part of 20-years.  Such as missing bills, billing issues, data gaps and the multitude of different software platforms that none of which really talk to each other. 

So, keeping our customers up to date on energy prices, market movements and the financial impact of that, so they can make the right decisions is really becoming more and more difficult, and that’s without all the additional layers of problems on top of that.  All of this has a direct impact on productivity.

If we look at how much productivity we lose on auditing and managing energy spend every year, we think in the past 20-years we believe this to be in excess of well over a million pounds.

And that’s just us, now imagine what that figure would mean to all UK business in general, It shouldn’t be like that anymore, technology has really caught up where the traditional energy market hasn’t, where we kind of look kind at the old part of the market really as an analogue market and we are now bringing a digital solution to that market space.

Jonny:  Wow, those are some big figures that you mentioned there and it’s a really interesting questions talking about how much productivity do we lose every year in the UK just managing energy spend. So, with reference to that could you tell us a little bit more about your new software platform.

Sure our cloud-based platform – Energy as a service interactive or EaaSi for short has been the culmination of 18-months of hard work, harnessing a technology called Robotic Process Automation or RPA for short, to make it work in parallel with the existing energy market infrastructure in the UK. 

To be honest RPA is the biggest thing that nobody has ever heard of really, but they will soon enough.  It’s still a very niche technology at the moment but it will become mainstream in the next couple of years. It basically enables the automation of manual tasks that would usually take people days or weeks to complete into just a few minutes or seconds.

It’s also about using RPA and the power of machine learning to add a new dynamic to energy management and wrap around the value for our customers. We can do things in this type of environment that we couldn’t ordinarily do and bring the management of energy to life through our platform. Just to give you a quick example of how RPA has already benefited us. 

We have a client with over 400 sites within the UK and we have been using industry leading invoice validation software to manage that client’s energy spend for a period of time.  Currently that process takes us around 6 working days and 6 manual touch points from when the bill is available to get that report to the customer for them to actually review their information. 

So, using the power of RPA that whole process is done in less than a day with no human interaction, so the productivity and efficiency savings for that customer are actually huge.

Jonny: So OK Chris using RPA sounds like it has started to make a massive difference within your business alone, can you explain a little more about how the process of RPA actually works.

OK, so from a bill validation perspective EaaSi uses automation to first of all log into suppliers billing portals and automatically collects individual bills, rather than waiting for them to come through either via email or post.  It can do this throughout the day or night or even at the weekends, so it is always out hunting for new data. On top of that if half hour data is also available, we will look to automatically pull that into the platform again in a real time environment. 

Then machine learning capabilities kick in, so if the system cannot recover all bills, it will identify what is missing and notify the utility supplier.  So again, that parts automated we don’t need to get involved with that.  Not only that it can also fill in the gaps, creating a dummy bill based on average price and consumption for that time of year all based on historical stored information. 

The platform then provides automated bill validation, comparing the bill against stored contractual rates and consumption, and more importantly contractual terms and conditions.  That process is fully automated with any anomalies flagged as alerts as it pulls in over a hundred different checks to ensure bill accuracy. 

The platform provides us with total visibility for both us and for our customers with transparency throughout the life-cycle of the contract.  The platform then produces a payment file. Once payment is made, the system the updates, and provides a full audit trail. And as Scott said earlier, this process happens in a matter of minutes not 6 days that we have been used to over the years.

Jonny: Wow RPA sounds really powerful, so beyond the automation what other benefits do you see the platform bringing to energy spend management.

Well I think the first thing is that the platform acts like a supplier agnostic digital filing cabinet, so you can have all of supplier PDF audit compliant invoices, credit notes, and contracts stored all in one place.  So, they become easily accessible for anyone in the organisation.  

As its cloud-based, customers can easily access what they need and when they need it.  Data is stored in a uniformed format, so we can quickly and easily analyse large amounts of data and report on lots of different key metrics.

So, for example we can very quickly model the data to create a range of spend forecasts or budget scenarios. Be that annual budget setting process or forecasting expected cost for the next 3-months, 6-month, 9-months etc. 

A lot of customers also ask us for the previous months cost, and they tend to need this very early on in the month so they can accrue the cost within their P&L.

We can provide not only this, but because we have good quality data, we can also run a within month expected cost now also, which is great for finance departments.

We can combine the data with other data so for example we have a non-commodity forecasting tool called cost-stacker.

We can use a customer actual data to provide future cost expectations and budgets for non-commodity charges in a live environment.

Because we have great data, we can then use the same information for other purposes such as when contract procurement is required, producing a tender pack within the platform that can be sent out directly to suppliers.

And one of the big areas that has got a lot of interest in the last 6-months is our carbon and greenhouse gas emissions reporting that can be used for compliance reporting

Jonny: OK, so we all know reducing our carbon footprint is high on the agenda of most businesses now. How will your Carbon reporting help a business in this area?

One of our customers in particular had been putting together their carbon reporting using manual data in excel spreadsheets which could take up to 2 weeks per month depending on verifying the data from accounts and the consumption from their meters.

The person responsible for this was a highly skilled employee who was doing this task alongside their day job.  The great thing now is due to all the invoicing and consumption data automatically coming into the platform and being validated, that particular employee spends 5 minutes a month now just downloading the ready-made carbon report and formatting it to their company’s requirements.

As the platforms cloud based, any of the key stakeholders within the business can review the company’s performance at any time. Also, before EaaSi this would have been days of work for us pulling together all the elements ready for a client meeting and further days on a periodic basis without a central platform to review.

Now with EaaSi the energy manager, the CFO, the head of procurement and the green team can all review their data at their own leisure and make great decisions to affect their business with great business data.

Jonny: So, some of the examples of the platform you have given have been about the benefits to your own business, and your existing customers, have you had any situations whereas you’ve used the platform with new prospective clients?

We have, we were approached by major client who was struggling to budget on an annual basis for an eight figure spend. Trying to understand your actual supplier spend and usage trends over a period of time is a real challenge for not just customers, but TPI’s too.

Put alongside this flexible purchasing and non-commodity forecasting and you can see how this can be a complex challenge for most businesses. The great way we could help the client was by loading 3 years of supplier and meter data into the EaaSi platform to analyse their trends and then breakdown the true cost of the non-commodity part of their spend with our Cost Stacker module so we could then provide more logic to an annual budget moving forward.

It’s a great win for the customer as they can now track that budget by meter point and their actual spend to give them a true budget, forecast and actual spend on an annual basis moving forward.

Jonny: Energy debt and credit is a concern for businesses, especially those with complex large portfolios. Have you any evidence on how the EaaSi platform might help those organisations?

It’s a great point, although the platform can benefit all businesses it’s really the complex, large multi-site portfolio customers where we see the biggest wins moving forward.

At a recent review meeting with one of our larger portfolio clients, they admitted it took 5 members of staff to process their water invoices manually with a continued struggle to manage the financial position with the supplier, which was a concern at board level.

Now those members of staff can be re-tasked on to other priorities saving our client multiple 10 figure sums with the automated collection and processing of their entire portfolio’s water invoicing and validation into their finance systems in less than one day.

What this will now provide to our client is energy spend certainty, which means the money they spend on their utilities is to the closest pound, validated, checked and into their finance systems before any invoices are paid.

It will be interesting to see how the EaaSi platform affects their net cash position on their water spend in the coming months.

Jonny: With your business heritage being within the procurement sector of the industry, providing flexible, fixed and pass through contracts to large industrial and commercial clients. How will the platform benefit what has been your core business for nearly 20 years?

Another great question and this for me is probably one of the most interesting areas outside of everything else that we have already covered. Because we have everything stored in one place and verified, we have really high quality and more importantly clean data that can be used when it comes to tendering the customers energy contracts.

Within the platform you can select from a panel of providers and a menu of requirements and request offers that can then be easily compared on a like for like basis.

This provides a great forward-looking view so customers can really understand not only their current costs but plan further ahead and maybe understand the current price risk for them without the need a formal full tender.

What’s most exciting is the ability for us to split a large portfolio up into individual lots, and then giving suppliers the choice of which lots they wish to quote for.

So, for example we may decide to split a portfolio up by region or size or consumption shape and then give suppliers the opportunity to quote for all or some of the portfolio. As the platform is supplier agnostic it makes no difference if we have 1 supplier or several suppliers servicing the same group account. Suppliers get to quote for the bits that they want to service.

We can then provide further choice for customers and compare what would be the overall cost based on just 1 supplier, or what combination of suppliers give us the best price overall.

We see this as a real game changer and predict that this will drive a better service and price for the customer.

Jonny: With customers now looking to breakdown their energy spend to target efficiencies and savings, how does EaaSi address these requirements?

The key to measuring any output from the customer, be this say their lighting consumption is to have the best data possible to start with.

As we are already automatically collecting their main meter data along with validating their energy spend with no human interaction, the customer has the perfect platform to then introduce further data points knowing any sub meter additions can be costed to the customers billing tariffing and offset against their main meter data.

EaaSi allows the creation of projects to collect the sub meter data and then validate it against the main meter consumption and spend, thus giving the customer clear accurate costs to analysis the data output.

The beauty of this means the customer has an accurate base to measure the existing data output (say lighting again) and its current costs to then compare a suggested new LED solution and what ROI will be provided.

Once the new solution has been put in place, the customer can then compare their ROI project with the actual data for performance measurement.

Also, on the back of that because we have such an abundance of good quality data and a really good insight to the customer energy use and requirements, we can re-purpose the data for other purposes.

Such as looking at the commercial viability of onsite renewable generation projects such as Wind, Solar, Storage and EV Infrastructure with our fully funded options based on a corporate PPA model.