It's full speed ahead for our operational digitalization initiative!

COODE was launched in April 2021 with the vision to empower our people, grow our digital capabilities, and tailor digital solutions to our business needs; such as safety, security and compliance – underpinned by a solid data management strategy.  

Digitalization at Uniper is focused on delivering value and competitive advantage – we have already seen a great return on investment to fund our future growth. For every €1 COODE invests, we have delivered over €4 back to the business in benefits already, a delivery target we are also committed to into the future. 

So far, we have received over 770 digital ideas from our people, implemented 90% of our original data management strategy, and delivered 220 use cases (ideas for digital solutions).  We are also realising our ambition to become a leader for digital technology in the energy sector – with global management consultants, McKinsey recognizing us as having one of the most digitalized assets in the world.  

Digitalization by our business for our business  

So, what makes COODE successful? Peter Struckmann, who leads COODE shares his thoughts:  

“COODE focuses on ideas for digital solutions that come direct from operational colleagues across our portfolio. Everyone in Uniper can see exactly what is being suggested, prioritized by the business, then developed and in use by our operations; including the cost and benefits of each use case. Everything is fully transparent, accessible, and tailored to the need of the end user. For me, that’s the number one impact of COODE.” 

 We don’t look for the latest app or technology, we look for challenges to solve and opportunities to drive value and improve the way we work and do business, and the best ideas from our operational teams. Fundamental to this approach is a robust governance structure – all our use cases are aligned to ISO 55001 – the international asset management standard that all our operational plants follow, which ensures every one of our new digital solutions actively contributes to the way we operate our business.   

Advancing data management  

 Another key difference is that through COODE, we now have a solid data management strategy in place to drive our digital evolution.  

 Before the program, our operational data wasn’t standardized or searchable and a lot of time was wasted across our businesses searching for data and creating reports in complex and unwieldy Excel documents. Now, all our apps are connected to the same reliable master data – giving our teams access to real time information and fully-integrated digital solutions that work, regardless of location or energy technology. 

Connecting with and learning from each other  

 It’s important to remember that digital evolution means different things to different people and sites, depending on where they are in their digitalization journey. COODE enables us to learn from each other. In recognition of this, COODE also invests in digital capability building. Across our fleets, Digital Champions and Connectors support colleagues to realize their digital ideas, share ways to improve way of working and access digital skills training such as our Digital KickStart initiative, which in 2023 accelerated digital understanding for Plant Leaders across 19 of our operational sites.   

One cohesive data platform, with transparency built in  

 “Creating a strong foundation for digital evolution is at the core of our strategy – including a secure IT framework, and a cloud based central data platform so all our digital solutions can connect and talk to each other.”  

 “We now have latest technology applications that not only deliver superior security, but also have data transparency built in – meaning colleagues across our operational businesses, regardless of location or technology now use the same single source of truth data, across multiple digital solutions, the power of this to give us competitive edge is now being realized.  

  Another important element is the introduction of new smart layer data - predefined data sets to make it easier creating power bi to visualize and analyze our reports.  “Now our people have ready-made, single source of truth operational data sets at their fingertips – that means no specialist knowledge is needed to put a query into our data platform. Our teams have absolute confidence that the data they can now easily drag and drop into their automated reporting and analysis dashboards is reliable, secure and trustworthy – it’s a game changer for enabling our people to make data driven insights and improve performance of our operations.” 

 Accelerating our energy transition    

 To date, the focus has been on improving the digital maturity and performance of our physical assets. Now, we are extending our COODE approach to accelerate performance across our growth projects. The benefit of our harmonized, technology independent approach is that we’re ready to respond as new fuels and generation technologies come on board and we build new assets and adapt our existing sites in a transformative environment.  

  “We have the technology, the data and the people to make digitalization useable for our business and deliver real insight. We will continue to tackle each new challenge and opportunity as we always have done – by developing digital solutions for everyone, not just one site, enabled by a culture that supports ideas and embraces new ways of working.”  

 It’s a testament to our impact that COODE is confirmed as a permanent team within the business, focusing on enabling our people to use digital tools to maximize business performance.  

 Thank you to all those who have made this journey possible. We look forward to the next step in our digital evolution together.