With 70,000 employees and 71 million customers in 34 countries, Enel is a world leader in energy services. With a mission to bring Open Power to cities, companies and households, Enel has been steadily moving towards digitalizing and democratizing access to data from within.
With information coming from virtually any location and so many departments, Enel reported that an average 80% of their efforts were being made to gather, evaluate and analyze necessary data — and only 20% to make appropriate decisions.
They spoke to iGenius to find a revolutionary way to boost data democracy and literacy in the organization by empowering every employee with real-time, accessible and easy-to-interpret information.
A smarter way for energy data
We created crystal to become the first Virtual Advisor that lets data do the talking (literally). This open and user-friendly advisor enables any desired data source to connect to crystal and start a real-time information stream. This is swiftly interpreted by crystal’s AI to turn raw numbers into actionable insights.
We applied crystal’s technology to Enel’s Global Thermal Generation Division, starting from the Granadilla, Candelaria and Punta Grande thermoelectric power stations, all based in the Canary Islands.
Everyone on Enel’s GTG division can now ask crystal a simple question about the current or expected status of a plant, simply by talking to their smartphone or writing from a computer. Thanks to Natural Language Processing, crystal answers in voice or writing based on each user’s preference, providing real-time data and sending notifications if anything changes.
The more questions users ask, the smarter crystal becomes, with its Machine Learning system building on previous interactions and informing proactively about related data.
Award-winning data intelligence
Could crystal create benefits for an energy leader like Enel and, ultimately, for the world?
In terms of efficiency, information is being made open and horizontal, working towards a democratization of all the available data so that everyone can make quicker decisions across Enel departments.
Another key benefit of crystal for Enel was increased data literacy among employees — that is their ability to get significant insights from data. crystal makes information clearer, as its AI takes on part of the data interpretation. Decision-making is then left to the user, yet crystal can make data-based suggestions to further facilitate the process.
crystal for Enel not only allows more time for data-driven decision-making, it decreases the time it takes to make sense of all the available data.
In an energy company, faster and better decisions make for greener choices, less energy waste, longer-term measures and quicker response to emergencies. All this work lead to something wonderful:
The project was featured at SMAU 2018, the top Italian technology fair held in Milan this October, winning their Prize for Innovation.
“We want to make real-time information accessible by both managers and plant operators’ points of views” said Antonio Crisol Puertas, Head of Operational Performance Optimisation at Enel Global Thermal Generation.
“We need democratized data so everyone has information for safer, more efficient decisions — this is also about minimizing environmental impact”.
The data revolution for Enel hasn’t stopped here. Plans are in place to make crystal the go-to data intelligence tool across the business.