With a strong tradition of using analytical solutions and using the MicroStrategy platform for more than ten years, COPEL (Companhia Paranaense de Energia), responsible for generating, transmitting and distributing electricity throughout the state, in addition to telecommunications services, has advanced another important step: the implementation of Self-Service BI (SSBI). The initiative, in addition to effectively integrating BI into the company's business processes, broke paradigms and cultural barriers in the company, increased control and allowed effective governance by the technology team.
With 60 years of existence, COPEL directly serves 4,391,313 consumer units in 395 municipalities and 1,113 localities (districts, towns and villages) in Paraná. This universe includes 3.5 million homes, 89 thousand industries, 373 thousand commercial establishments and 369 thousand rural properties. The staff is made up of 8,653 employees.
According to Jeferson Guerber Kindl, from COPEL's IT area, to get to SSBI, a long way has been taken with regard to the adoption of analytical tools within the company. The great precursor was the project to implement a strategic panel, created to meet the needs of the presidency and which allows the monitoring of the main indicators, based on data updated daily. “Finding the right sponsor to leverage Business Intelligence was the first challenge for us to achieve our goals. When the IT team effectively approached the strategic planning area to work on the development of this cockpit for senior management, our analytical projects reached another level ”, he emphasizes.
Until then, the high volume of information coming from the most diverse areas of the company was consolidated in electronic spreadsheets and was treated by a series of tools and resources, many times not approved by the IT area.
BI for all
With the development of SSBI, all data, ranging from technical content to important company management processes, started to be explored in a much simpler way. The spreadsheets are loaded within the BI environment by the user himself, according to his needs. Not to mention that the answers are also obtained much more quickly and with more efficient and assertive content.
Some applications, which streamline and modify the routine and still provide cost reduction, started to be developed internally by anyone without dependence on IT. A business specialist in the area of Distribution Defaults, for example, created a new process based on BI, which provided significant resource savings. The execution time of their tasks, which include the daily sending of summaries related to default rates, cuts in the power supply, went from hours to minutes. In this case, the SSBI, in addition to automating and centralizing a complex process previously performed by multiple tools, made the presentation of these reports more refined, thanks to dashboards and data plotting on maps.
This new application also increased the effectiveness of the BI structure within COPEL. “When a new demand for an analytical solution arises, instead of, as in the past, following a sequence of activities, the need is most often met promptly. This is all being the main factor for leveraging the tool in the organization, ”says Kindl.
To put the project into practice, COPEL structured its information technology (IT) environment, conducted a series of internal training sessions with end users, defined and detailed an implementation strategy. This process took about six months to complete. The use of the visualization capabilities of the data exploration tool, MicroStrategy Visual Insight were one of the crucial points in making the projects feasible.
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