Competitive pressure is increasing in the energy market - for utilities such as badenova, opportunities are arising to differentiate themselves from the competition through new services and digital offers. For this purpose, data from various communication channels must be collected, adapted and made available to specific target groups in the required quality. The goal is to support data-driven business decisions and to use them for evaluation purposes and marketing campaigns, e.g. for the automation of marketing.

Step by step to a digital company

badenIT GmbH is a wholly owned subsidiary of badenova AG & Co. KG and is responsible for a large part of the energy provider’s IT infrastructure. badenIT is one of the leading managed service and IT infrastructure providers in southwest Germany. The company provides infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service for badenova and a host of other customers, as well as operating its own data centres and fibre optic networks such as the Metro Ethernet fibre optic network in Freiburg. 
 

badenova is the largest energy and environmental service provider in South Baden, which has set itself the goal of offering a comprehensive range of services as a basic supplier of gas, water, electricity, internet and e-mobility. The company stands for sustainable and reliable energy solutions in the field of green electricity and natural gas in the South Baden region. It employs around 1,400 people.

To meet the requirements, doubleSlash worked with badenIT to set up a data lake that integrates data from various channels. Both unstructured and structured data from various sources were collected, adapted and analyzed. A data lake zone model notation adapted by doubleSlash was used to structure the process and visualize the data flows.

Based on this, the different quality levels of data (zones) and the transitions (transformations) between these zones were modeled, designed and implemented as part of a subsequent implementation phase.

The Data Lake is by no means intended to replace existing production systems (e.g. ERP). It is a useful addition as an analytical platform for evaluating large volumes of data.

The data science team at badenova can use the database created in this way to provide the marketing and sales team with information for evaluations, marketing campaigns and new product developments. Based on the data obtained, data-supported decisions can be made and automated in the future, especially in the areas of

• the optimization of processes,
• the development of new offers that are geared towards and optimally cover the needs of customers and their life cycle, and 
• making the opportunities available to other badenova subsidiaries.

The project was realized jointly by doubleSlash and the badenova IT subsidiary badenIT. Interdisciplinary collaboration and the use of agile methods made the project a success.

doubleSlash was responsible for the conception and technical development of the Data Lake applications. badenIT focused on hosting the basic and Hadoop infrastructure and supporting the application. Together, we were able to cover the entire software lifecycle and develop a suitable solution for badenova. A major challenge here was to master the growing complexity of the data volumes and sources while remaining scalable for new products and market requirements.

• At the start of the project, the requirements of the various specialist departments were recorded and the basic technical framework was created.
• The plan for the future is to connect additional sources and target systems to the data lake. This will enable badenova to understand customers even better, address them in a targeted manner and automate decisions and processes.

The interaction and networking of the two IT companies is the best proof of the potential of digital partnering – for both sides. As the client, badenova is familiar with the infrastructure as well as the market and the customer requirements. They sent their experienced IT subsidiary badenIT into the race for requirements: a high-performance, regional provider of competent, goal-oriented IT and communication solutions with strong expertise in infrastructure such as Hadoop clusters. doubleSlash as the digital partner brings the required IT know-how for implementing the data lake project and the agile culture, especially in the context of design, architecture and implementation of data pipelines. These intertwined professional and creative competence areas form an excellent basis for a targeted, investment-safe approach. What’s more, risks can be spread over several shoulders and the complexity of IT projects can be successfully reduced.

As a client of both companies, badenova benefited from the shared know-how, speed and flexibility, which are all decisive success factors when it comes to developing technologies and markets. As a result, companies from other sectors can also drive forward their digital transformation with doubleSlash and badenIT – quickly, flexibly and proactively. The foundations have been laid for sustainable cooperation in the future: collaboratively designing and implementing digital projects.

• Requirements managementI
• T and workflow design
• Software architecture
• Design, architecture and implementation of data pipelines based on data staging, data zones and data pipelines
• Agile project management
• Agile software development
• Test management
• 3rd level support
• IT infrastructure expertise
   

• Hadoop
• Hive
• Kafka
• Zeppelin Notebooks
• OpenStack Cloud Platform
• Docker
• Java
• SpringBoot
• Maven