Project Details
Challenges
- Like many businesses in data-intensive industries with transaction system on A/S 400, VGS wanted to modernize their data management using today’s technologies and technics. As a growing energy provider, Vermont Gas required a complete and scalable data management solution. With more than 20 data sources to pull from, the solution needed to be able to integrate data from challenging API formats.
Solutions
VGS chose Passerelle to leverage Talend Cloud Data Management and Talend Cloud Data Services for data integration and management. After initial success with Talend services, Vermont Gas expanded its technology investment, updating its data architecture with Passerelle Data Rocket – an optimized framework of Talend Data Integration, Snowflake Data Cloud and PowerBI visual analytics.
- Passerelle QuickStart – Passerelle data architects configured and implemented API services software and provided training to Vermont Gas information technology team members. As a result, VGS began to see the benefits of the Talend software solution immediately.
- Data Rocket, VGS was able to reduce overtime immediately and provide more efficient management of service orders.
Vermont Gas (VGS) is a leader in energy efficiency and innovation, offering a clean, safe, affordable choice for over 53,000 homes, businesses, and institutions in northwest Vermont. They pride themselves on providing timely, comprehensive service for all their customers, ensuring they have heat, hot water, and energy to get through the cold New England winter.
However, VGS noted they were having some trouble getting service orders completed efficiently. They found they didn’t have enough trucks to fulfill their service orders, employees were working overtime, and customers weren’t getting their problems solved in a timely way. “We knew our existing reports were dated and challenging to maintain,” said Eric Hillmuth, Customer Technology Solutions Manager at Vermont Gas. “To solve this problem, we needed to implement an enterprise BI platform that will let us use data to address our business challenges like service quality and workforce efficiency.”
Launching the Data Rocket
If VGS wanted to deliver the caliber of service their customers expected, they needed accessible, healthy data they could trust in real time. And, to make sure everything runs as efficiently as possible, they wanted to have accurate data reporting available to anyone in the company who needed it.
To achieve this level of data health, VGS united four superheroes of data: Talend, Snowflake, Power BI on Azure, and Passerelle to coordinate it all — creating the Passerelle Data Rocket. VGS now has comprehensive, near real-time account information. With Talend, data that once existed in separate silos is now seamlessly integrated, streamlining customer information, billing systems, payment providers, and online account information to provide a superior customer experience. For data warehousing, Snowflake was the right solution because it scales significantly better than they ever thought possible. VGS was able to load their server data from all the way back to 1965 for maybe a few cents without even breaking a sweat. And to understand what all that real-time data means, VGS is using Power BI for their business analytics solution. “It was the best choice for visual analytics,” says Hillmuth. “The PowerBI offering best fit for our excel savvy users with rich features and easy to stand up services.”
Hillmuth noted, “You can’t put a value on a solution that works end to end like the Passerelle Data Rocket. We fit better with Passerelle from the get-go and have since had a lot of success.”
Thanks to the successful Data Rocket launch, Vermont Gas employees have new reporting capabilities they didn’t have before. The company expects to be able to reduce overtime and provide more efficient management of service orders. This will improve employee satisfaction; with only 25 service technicians, employee satisfaction critical to keep delivering great service to customers. Happy employees lead to happy customers.
In addition, the Passerelle Data Rocket improves service order efficiency at a very reasonable cost. The solution was also quick to implement. With Snowflake’s flexibility and pay-per-used model, VGS put Data Rocket into action during downtime of existing projects.
Data Rocket to future proofs data technology investment
Hillmuth foresees all kinds of opportunities for improving customer satisfaction, introducing new products, and creating even more employee satisfaction with healthy, accessible data. The Passerelle Data Rocket can scale to support all data and all use cases, delivering further ROI on customer data in new areas like consumption and billing.
“Together with Talend, the Passerelle Data Rocket gives us the flexibility and confidence that the tool will do what we need it to. Unlike our legacy systems, you don’t need to be a software engineer to build powerful integrations,” says Hillmuth.
As VGS transitions to a post carbon business model, Hillmuth expects to leverage the Data Rocket to help develop new products and strategies. In the next six to nine months, VGS plans to expand the number of data sources that are being pulled into the Data Rocket to gain more insights. With their next priority being to focus on using data to perform preventative maintenance on heating equipment. This will prevent late night calls in the dead of a Vermont winter where a technician needs to drive out to a customer in need.
And Vermont Gas is building more assets with Talend like using cloud-based data warehousing services to decrease reliance on on-premises infrastructure, improving business intelligence capabilities, and staying on the leading edge of technology. Hillmuth says, “The Passerelle Data Rocket allows us to make more intelligent business decisions, and that can only lead to better experiences for our customers.”
