How to deploy disruptive digital O&M solutions for Energy & Utilities companies? It’s all about trust.
As Head of Customer Success for Smart O&M — ENGIE Group’s new, standard, digital O&M (Operations & Maintenance) solution — I oversee all deployment projects to maximize value for ENGIE’s activities. My role is to ensure that Smart O&M delivers concrete, measurable business benefits. This implies successfully guiding customers through the entire implementation journey, from initial discussions with key stakeholders to mass usage by O&M teams in the field. After four years, Smart O&M is now being extensively rolled out across regions like the Middle East and Southeast Asia, as well as globally for specific installations such as EV charge stations. I’d like to share a few practical insights on how to deploy in-house disruptive digital solutions for O&M and show why success mostly depends on creating and maintaining trust over time.
ENGIE Digital is an internal software editor — why is an in-house Customer Success team necessary?
Digital transformation is an obvious mandatory step for large long-standing companies, and most of them face the same challenges in the transformation process, especially in the Energy & Utilities industry.
Firstly, digital solutions require significant efforts in setting them up correctly: good quality data needs to be provided, working processes standardized; and use cases specified, etc. Secondly, robust change management must be applied to smoothly adjust a company’s existing operating model. Customer Success is needed to provide continuous support to adapt, adopt, and actually leverage technologies to unlock business value.
In addition, there are common preconceptions which will inevitably pop up, and will need to be overcome to successfully deploy a digital transformation:
- “Our current way of working is good enough, we’ve always managed to reach our targets like this”
→ make stakeholders aware that improving does not mean that they should be ashamed of the previous situation, but that they will be able to address limitations, which are often well-known internally. - “New technology is plug-and-play and will quickly solve all our current issues”
→ manage expectations by providing ahead a clear vision of the path to follow and the conditions required to benefit from the software implementation.
The Customer Success team is geared towards initiating trusting relationships with managers involved in the transformation and make it last by focusing on the targeted business benefits.
How to implement a new digital O&M solution: be ready for a 4-step journey
There are several successive steps in projects for adopting new digital solutions. What makes this journey within the Energy & Utilities industry quite specific is the pressure on O&M costs. Making these activities efficient and profitable requires sharing resources (technical workforce, expertise, tools, machines, devices, and software, etc.) across assets and installations. And the business case for deploying a digital solution, especially in-house ones, is only positive at scale. It is rare that the ROI of an implementation on a limited scope of activities will finance the full investment needed (solution set-up, administrator upskilling, user training, and change management material).
So, you don’t just need to launch the project, you also need to make sure you will steer it until the deployment at scale stage.
For the Customer Success team, the starting point is showing company entities that:
- The overall strategy and related guidelines make the cost of not changing the current way of working higher than initiating an O&M transformation.
- The digital team is reliable and trustworthy, it understands operational constraints and is able to support the design of a desirable target way of working.
Challenges and key success factors for each step
1. Raise interest and convince business and operations teams to digitize activities with your solution.
It is not easy to find the right sponsors within an organization: top management is often far from understanding O&M teams’ daily challenges. In the field, managers have very limited time to discuss structural change in the ways of working and have restricted influence on general strategy; and cross-business functions may not be empowered to push change effectively. And, in large companies, you must also face general inertia.
Promoting an internal solution involves additional difficulties, especially at the beginning because you start from scratch, and you get compared to competitors, which can show return of experience in other organizations. As a matter of fact, in the digital field, market solutions always have a better image than internal ones because their marketing material is fancier, and they get less challenged by the target users.
To overcome these hurdles, you should:
- Identify key sponsors among the managers whose position requires them to challenge the status quo and convince them that your solution will help adjust to new market trends.
- Provide them with a clear value proposition and the relevant angles for launching a project. Basically, suggest the right use cases for the right scope of activities to simplify decision-making processes.
Obviously, drumming up enough backing to get a green light mostly relies on your capacity to be seen as trustworthy: show contextual business expertise and prove that the solution is appropriate.
With Smart O&M, we managed to generate an initial flicker of interest thanks to strong presentation skills, but it took us two years of experience to finalize a first simple, comprehensive and convincing pitch of the solution’s business value.
2. Don’t lose track of the project at the specification and configuration stage.
Once the project is launched you can start defining how the solution must be used, and then configure it accordingly. This is the part where you will have to support your customer when they hit their first wall and realize that digital technology is not magic after all, and that significant work is needed to standardize processes and collect data.
We call this phase the “Valley of tears”! The gap between the initial target and what a company can actually adopt, based on process maturity, team flexibility and a legacy ecosystem that needs to be dealt with, is generally quite big in Energy & Utilities.
This will often lead to revising the project’s goal from aiming for major improvements to making the solution work with an acceptable set-up, despite relinquishing some initial ambitions. For example, you will see customers deciding to postpone feature rollouts because the effort for the teams to prepare or use them is too high.
Here are two success factors to help ease this unavoidable pain:
- A strong, dedicated project team combining local and solution resources with complementary skills and knowledge (technical expertise, field experience, and O&M know-how) and an appropriate governance body to sustain pace and strategic vision.
- A knowledge management process to capitalize on lessons learnt from each project and collect best practices (including standard configuration examples) to make the next implementation more efficient and reduce total lead time before reaching the go-live phase.
During this phase, trust is greatly at risk and even more so for internal software as managers will be tempted to blame a solution which is promoted by the Group rather than an external one, which they would have chosen themselves. This is where most projects stop or become irremediably damaged. We unfortunately experienced this with a few entities and managed to learn and improve from these failures. Only solid transformation project methodology, and experience, will remove inevitable doubts.
3. Closely monitor adoption post go-live to boost added value and business transformation.
A common mistake is thinking that the solution’s validation and go-live is the end of the journey… Handing it over to end users is an important project milestone but this is just the beginning of the actual business transformation. After a demanding implementation phase, if only minimum efforts are made to ensure that the solution is well adopted by Operations, this will likely lead to failure. Beyond functionality training programs, each category of teams involved in O&M activities should be guided and supported in getting as much value as possible from the new technology in real life. Limited capacity to handle feedback, either through configuration adjustments or relevant usage suggestions, will end up with suboptimal optimization leverage.
Two top support tips:
- Track solution adoption with dedicated activity KPIs to detect potential solution misuse.
- Use lean management methodologies, mobilize key users in short feedback loops to understand challenges, and suggest adjustments to improve and measure successful output.
This step is key to fostering trust in the value of digital change within the company. Because it is challenging to transform ways of working in Energy & Utilities, the project adoption team needs to be able to talk to each type of stakeholder, they need to understand and adjust to each specific point of view. So, as surprising and expensive as it may initially seem, having a skilled Customer Success team to support rolling out an internal solution is a rational and legitimate investment. This is the reason behind my role within Smart O&M.
4. Promote operational successes, while rolling out the solution at scale, to activate a virtuous circle.
The last step of the journey is obviously the solution’s general rollout. It is challenging to move from punctual implementation on a limited scope to deployment at scale. Firstly, you need to be able to handle additional use cases related to non-standard processes and contexts, as each entity claims to have specific needs (contract, customer, installation, and local organization, etc.). Secondly, you will have to perform migrations when existing solutions are already being used in the field. Finally, you must industrialize configurations and training activities, which require significant investment in a transformation program and associated change management.
To address these challenges, you should focus on two topics:
- Introduce professional digital transformation program methodologies and resources to steer and perform rollout activities at scale and foster standard or existing use cases, as much as possible (refer for example to ERP deployment project: fit/gaps analysis matrix, migration tools, and standard training material, etc.)
- Create powerful Marketing/Communications content to promote business value provided by the change, based on initial experiences and users feedback, to demonstrate the solution’s accessibility and global profitability to management and all O&M teams.
This is the most important phase for Customer Success as it will determine whether you can reach the critical mass of users required to make the solution cost effective. The more users you gain, the easier it will be to convince and guide additional teams through the journey and the stronger the business case will be. Smart O&M is now entering this phase within ENGIE.
Customer Success: how can you tell that the journey is over?
In my opinion, a digital transformation journey is a never-ending story. Nevertheless, the Customer Success team’s job is done when a local entity fully appropriates the new digital solutions. This means that the local teams can imagine by themselves new use cases to optimize operations, cover new types of activities, and even use the solution to create new business opportunities. At this stage, you return to your role as software editor and your value will be mostly to follow up on business innovation to facilitate experience sharing between customer entities and cross fertilization. Basically, when we reach this stage, Smart O&M will generate trust by itself and won’t need Customer Success to back it up.
Find out more about how Smart O&M supports its clients: https://digital.engie.com/en/smart-om-manages-your-technical-installations-real-time-make-maintenance-efficient-and-transparent
