Airtricity

SSE Airtricity

Design of Sales Pipeline Solution and Cloud Migration Project

Company

SSE Airtricity is one of the fastest-growing energy utility companies and part of the FTSE Top-50 listed companies. SSE Group is the broadest-based energy company in Ireland and the UK. SSE Airtricity is Ireland’s second largest and greenest energy provider supplying greener electricity and natural gas to over 800,000 homes and businesses on the island.

Challenge

Airtricity needed to implement a cloud based solution to enable their commercial sales team members to communicate with management in a more efficient manner. Management had already identified that the lack of a pipeline solution was a major cause of frustration in their organisation with stalled opportunities and unrealistic timelines. Both of these were also seen to have major impacts on forecast accuracy and pipeline velocity within the organisation along with insufficient or ineffective qualification of the opportunity in the early stages of the sales cycle. It was agreed that the identification and deployment of a suitable partner with the necessary expertise in this area would go a long way towards resolving the problem. An internal team were tasked with shortlisting a number of vendors and ERS were invited to engage at this time.

Solution

After a review of a number of vendors Airtricity/SSE commissioned ERS to develop an application that would enable their corporate sales teams to create dynamic quotations and manage their sales pipeline in a structured manner. Successful opportunities would then be converted into customer contracts and provide both the sales team and management with reporting visibility on renewals when due.

This project took a great deal of analysis and design because of the complexities involved in migrating from an on premise repository to a cloud base solution which involved migrating over 1 million records. While the project did not have a huge amount of stakeholders (50+) it was deployed across multiple geographies using multi-currency entities. The solution now provides each sales representative with access to their current pipeline and management have instant visibility as to the active pipeline along with competitor analysis. Once the development phase was completed our solution consultants performed the Private Cloud configurations and migrated the solutions to the new CRM2013 infrastructure.

Results

Airtricity have now fully deployed their online pipeline management system to their commercial sales representatives in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Sales representatives can manage their pipeline from the office or remotely and management now receive updated reports on a monthly basis. The communication void has now been filled and both forecasting and visibility is managed in an efficient manner. ERS continues to be an invaluable project management partner to Airtricity and is currently engaged in other custom work and supporting services.