Digitalizing our operational fleet

Exactly one year ago this week, I accepted a new challenge -  to lead the digitalization of our operational fleets as EVP Digital Evolution in the Chief Operations Officer area (COO) covering roughly 35GW of generation and storage assets with a working gas capacity of around 8 billion cubic meters. Excited by the opportunity, I remember thinking that my background in engineering, asset management and strategy execution would serve me well in shaping the digital future of our operational business. Infact, the most important skills I needed was change management and how best to engage our people - but I’ll come to that later.

One year on I’d like to share my experience with you, the challenges I have faced along with our fleet of 28 power plants, 10 energy storage facilities, 4500 operational colleagues and our central management teams, and how we’ve come to develop our digital roadmap.

Our first challenge: If we don’t know the final destination – how can we plot the journey?

Our fleet portfolio of hydro, gas, steam and biomass, and storage assets are responding to rapid change. The way we will generate, store and trade energy will be very different in just a few years. The future of our operations requires new ideas, new thinking, new digital ways of working and a new set of digital skills. For us to stay relevant we need to be competitive, across all our operational plants in Germany, UK, Netherlands, Sweden and Hungary. Increased competitiveness will enable us to fund growth and the investment needed in our energy evolution. We are planning to invest until end of 2023 2.7 billion Euros into the transformation of our portfolio (excluding major take overs).

With our European generation business, we are committed to delivering net zero by 2035. But how our portfolio will look in the years ahead is not fixed – so we need to be agile in our approach. This applies not only to the optimization of our current generation technologies, but even more importantly to lay the foundation for the future assets that will transform our portfolio and dominate the energy industry very soon. We must have the agility to adapt and use new innovations and digital solutions in different technologies from the ones we are running today. We are convinced that digital is the next step change in performance for the energy sector and with our digitalization initiative in the COO area our ambition is to become a leader in digital technology in our sector. We believe that data and the way we manage and use it will become one of Uniper's key differentiators.

Challenge#2: How do you set expectations of a digitalization program when the technology is moving so fast?

We set ourselves program framework objectives rather than specific technology goals. In fact, our aim is that the solutions that are chosen for wider take up are technology agnostic – so that they can be picked up and applied across our whole current and future portfolio regardless of technology type. 

Our vision for the three-year program is to:  

- Secure and strengthen our foundation

Uniper’s launch gave us the opportunity to completely modernize our IT landscape and Damian (our CIO) and his team made an excellent job of giving us a very modern, cloud only infrastructure. So, we are building on a great foundation and can focus on developing new and agile ways of working to connect, simplify and automate operational activities across our portfolio. We strive for “one touch” automated workflows for process execution by connecting systems rather than building new complex ones.

- Tailor solutions to our business

We don’t look for the latest APP or gadget – we look for problems and the best ideas from our operational teams. Our focus is on driving value and improving the way we work and do business. Only if we tailor each solution to the day-to-day needs of our colleagues do we create the necessary acceptance and motivation to use them. Digital tools can have no impact without our people using them

- Enable net zero

Our energy evolution can only be delivered with the success of digitalization.

- Increase our competitiveness  

Competition in the energy industry is intensifying through data- and technology-driven approaches. The energy sector is becoming more volatile, more decentralized and decarbonized. Rapidly developing (IT) technology and smart use of data, will help us to make better decisions, understand market developments before our competitors, and increase the efficiency of our internal processes  - crucial elements for our success in such a rapidly changing environment.

- Support HSSE ambitions

“Beyond zero” is our Uniper COO 2025 HSSE Vision and digitalization offers great opportunities to further improve our HSSE performance. For example, by limiting human interaction in potentially dangerous environments, ensuring maintenance compliance and sharing lessons learned.

- Empower our people and grow digital capabilities

Digitalization is a cornerstone for building the future energy system, but it is our people who will play the most important role. Therefore, we are targeting a sustainable digital future by focusing on our people, listening to their ideas, encouraging their creativity, creating engagement, driving ownership and helping them to grow strategic digital capabilities.

Challenge #3: How do you initiate a digital change programme across 5 countries, 38 diversified assets and engage over 4500 people – without chaos?

We’ve approached this in two ways - building on the experience and professionalism of our Operational Excellence teams – and aligning our programme to ISO 55001.

Since 2012 our Operational Excellence teams have been establishing a culture to help Uniper work as efficiently as possible, removing waste and inefficiencies – combining operational processes, management systems, mindset and behaviour. With this established, we’ve been able to work in partnership with them to see how we use digital innovations to:

• deliver value to our internal and external customers
• solve problems and optimize established processes
• champion how we can use data to optimize complex and large volume processes.

Secondly, by aligning the program framework to ISO 55001, which is the international asset management standard that all our operational plants follow, we’re enabling our people to identify digital solutions for their plant problems using the professional approach they take in their day-to-day job.

All digital improvements and solutions we are developing are linked back to this framework, enabling a system thinking approach and the connection of our business units via data across the entire value stream.

Success #1 : We began our asset digitalization program with a solid foundation 

Digitalization at Uniper did not begin with my appointment - our first group wide asset operations digitalization initiative started in 2017 and was called digitalization@generation (D@G). It had the aim to transform our generation assets into data driven businesses and deliver fit for purpose technology. D@G concluded in 2019 and taught us a lot – we had successes, but also failures and the experience of that program has been fundamental in shaping our new COO digitalization program.

We also have existing initiatives that have been brought under our new program umbrella, so that all our operational digital initiatives are together. For example:

• The use of artificial intelligence to directly operate asset processes such as the combustion in waste-to-energy or biomass-to-energy called operaite.
• A central digital asset management platform – Enerlytics, one central location to make visible and share plant data and manage digital applications for condition monitoring, performance, risk and maintenance activities.
• And more recently Celonis –the process mining solution which our Center of Competence is applying group wide, for example on procurement and we have been helping to apply it in areas such as maintenance for power plants.

Success #2: We changed our approach – and listened to our people

A key success factor for the current programme was to take the lessons learned from D@G and apply them to this initiative. And because we know the rapid pace of change affecting our sector, this year we consulted again across our 38 operational units. Our plant leaders told us: 

•  Our digital initiatives in the past have not been applied in a systematic and consistent way. This meant we were not able to engage our people at the level necessary. We need to improve communication of our vision and goals and identify the relevance for not only the wider business but local teams
• When rolling out digital solutions we did not provide enough support to our businesses. We were seen as “throwing apps over the fence” and not supporting our teams through implementation.
• We have not put enough focus on people and culture, and if we want to be successful going forward, then we need to center our activities around our people.

We took that feedback very seriously and developed the current program, which was launched internally in May 2021.

Our new digital transformation program is called COO Digital Evolution - COODE

The explanation of what COODE is and what it is not, is detailed below, I think this really shows how we’ve changed our thinking over the past year by listening to our teams more and really putting our people at the center of what we do. COODE is a program “by our business for our business”.

We call it digital evolution and not revolution or disruption because with COODE we are not looking at new business models on how to make money with digital tools or from data - but at continuously improving how we operate our physical assets and run our business processes, so that we drive value for our company.

Our people have the ideas and vision for digital solutions that can solve their plant problems.

The focus of COODE is on operational problems and the ideas from our ~ 4500 fleet operational colleagues.  Engineers love solving problems and this is at the core of this digitalization initiative – it’s not about the latest technology or APP, it’s about our people who know their operations best, having a problem and an idea on how to do something better.

The first step for colleagues to explore digital solutions in Uniper is our cloud native Digital Idea Tracker (DiT). The DiT, together with our App Store gives full transparency across our fleets of all operational focused digital solutions already purchased, developed, or currently being worked on. Everything is in one place (there are over 400 ideas currently in the DiT) and access is for everyone. Moreover, as we are linking all solutions and ideas entered back to the ISO 55000 standard, this helps us eliminate overlapping systems and duplication.

For example, if an operator in one of our hydro plants in Germany has a great idea where no digital solution is available on site yet; but another operator in the Netherlands is working on a similar idea, using the DiT brings them together to develop the best solution with the widest adaptability possible.  

COODE brings operational teams, developers and fleets together

The DiT ranks the ideas (we call them use cases once they have been recorded) then within the COODE structure what will be developed next is completely decided by our operational organization.

For all digital use cases to be realized, the COODE program provides the software developers and the framework – by bringing operational teams and individuals together (we call this DevOps) from all levels of our organization we make sure the digital solution is fit for purpose.  Then the same team also support our operational business during implementation on the sites that choose to take the respective digital solution - with IT support to also ensure flawless operation. As an additional back up the monitoring capability built into the COODE platform also makes sure that once a solution is rolled out it will be reliable and available whenever needed.

With this approach we are creating a unique digital user experience with reliable and accessible systems which are easy to use - eliminating all potential waste while developing them. This is very important since our operational colleagues need to work within our systems across all our technologies to have a real business impact. 

To make sure everybody is aware and capable in each local asset we have Digital Champions, whilst at fleet level, we have Digital Connectors helping to drive the digital transformation we are looking for. Additionally, we are using the “Digital Skill Compass”, a learning platform offering learning journeys for all relevant digital topics.

COODE is preparing us for our energy future - regardless of the shape our portfolio will take through the energy evolution.

With our COODE approach we have built one common program of work and aligned all digital activities in one system. Having all our fleets innovating on the same system is an incredibly powerful source for improving and optimizing the way we run our business.

In this year of working together we have been successful in:

• Implementing digital processes that are independent from the technology type of the asset
• Launching a change program that encourages people out of their comfort zones (digital non-natives learning and adapting to digital ways of working)
• Introducing DevOps – pairing both excellence in operations and excellence in software development to deliver top-notch digital applications that withstand technology development and the changes in the Uniper asset portfolio that the energy evolution will bring
• Implementing the data strategy for the COO area enabling free flow of data (data democratisation across the entire company)
• Providing full transparency on all digital activities across our entire portfolio, fostering a culture of sharing and learning
• Developing an infrastructure (platform and connectivity of remote sites) where we can link systems and provide data to create “one touch” automated workflow for our business processes
• And delivering against our ambitious business plan.

So, as I reflect and look forward into another year - I want to thank my operational colleagues for the vital role they have played. Their professionalism has ensured Uniper keeps the lights on and delivers the security of supply we have all come to rely on, whilst in addition, working intensively on the masterplans for the future of our operations - and still I've seen a tremendous amount of energy and creativity to drive our digitalization activities.

I’m excited for our digital energy future and very optimistic that we will be able to live up to our ambition to become a leader in digital technology in the energy sector.