ELES: Guarding Slovenian transmission network with BE-terna cloud solution

ELES went through several transformations over their rich timeline, but the digital one begun in 2012 when the company released a public tender for a digital solution. After years of using their in house on-prem solution, the stakeholders realized that it is no longer sustainable to rely on manual data entry to make informed decisions on a scale that the company needs. During the tender process, BE-terna stood out with their unique offering.

BE-terna is our long year partner. BE-terna (former Adacta) was implementation partner for our first Microsoft ERP solution – AX2012. When we considered to move to newer version of Microsoft ERP system, logical choice for us would be to engage BE-terna. We made public tender and BE-terna proofed to be the best fit for our needs.

    Tamara Slapar, Deputy ICT director at ELES

The initial solution go live was finalized in 2015 and ELES stepped into the digital future. By implementing BE-terna Utilities and Infrastructure based on Microsoft Dynamics AX, ELES successfully provided support to a large share of business processes and digitized them. The processes that were now fully digital include accounts receivables and payable, general ledger, annual planning, monitoring of costs and revenues, fixed assets, banking operations, financial operations, human resources, payroll, procurement, support for public tenders, technical assets, car fleet management, energy accounting and sales, marketing and billing for services.

We assured needed support for the business processes within ERP with the first implementation already. Focus with this second implementation was to use standard functionalities as much as possible and to make further optimisation of business processes. We are using BE-terna's UIM product which allows us to have better support within the system for investment projects, public procurement and asset management, segments that are for our company most important.

    Darko Kramar, Director of corporate services at ELES

The second phase of digitization of ELES was the transition to the cloud solution, once again BE-terna was the reliable partner to make this transition possible for ELES. Even though the initial plan was not to go with the cloud solution due to some concerns in regard to cybersecurity and data protection soon it become clear that it has many benefits especially in terms of security, availability of service, accessibility of the system and having an evergreen solution. The company did a TCO analysis of both on premise and cloud solution and based on those results the decision was made. Another benefit of the transition to the cloud was the fact that ELES did not want to depend on building their own IT infrastructure, as IT specialists are hard to come by.

The company made efforts to stick to the standardized solution as much as possible, allowing them to take advantage of having cleaner processes, embedded power BI reports to access needed information much quicker. During this transition, ELES implemented data lake, which allows them to do more complex insight reports than they were able in the past. 

Main expectations were to get modern solution, that would be easy to maintain and upgrade to newest version available. Our plan was to move functionalities, that are not “natural” for ERP, outside the ERP and to use IT systems that are developed for such use. We wanted to implement service bus to get better inside and overview for integrations within different systems and to implement data management. Together with Be-terna we succeeded to meet all desired goals.

    Tamara Slapar, Deputy ICT director at ELES

The latest project collaboration between BE-terna and ELES is DIGI-ELES project, a complete digital transformation strategy aimed to prepare the company for future energy requirements, securing data-based decision-making by introducing Internet of Things, digital twins, RPA and artificial intelligence as well as increasing efficiency and employee satisfaction.

DigiELES is first official digitalisation project in our company. It is partly financed through EU, and it is a project with expected deliveries for different stakeholders within company. Among other expected deliveries are RPA for certain chosen processes, implementation of IoT devices in fleet management, introduction of VR and AR in asset management, introduction of platform for sustainability reporting, AI for better decisions for further network development etc. Main goal of all these activities is to develop and enhance digital competencies that will help address future challenges.

      Tamara Slapar, Deputy ICT director at ELES

With one of the main objectives of DIGI-ELES project is introducing a digital culture across the entire organization and implementing change. To maximize the effectiveness of digital transformation, the BE-terna team used a transformation methodology that allowed ELES teams to establish a single view of the desired outcome and determine the best path to reach a common goal. The plan is to continue with process optimization and to implement process automation as much as possible for ELES employees to have time and resources for tasks with higher value added. They plan to implement proper support for portfolio and project management to get 360-degree insight of the assets – from the time they were first planned through investment, maintenance till end of use.

Almost a decade of continuing successful cooperation between BE-terna and ELES show just how dedicated ELES is to their goal of complete digitization of their processes and operations, as well as BE-terna being a reliable partner to offer the right solution and guide them through the process. BE-terna expertise and in-depth industry know-how proved to bi the ideal combination to achieve all of ELES expectations. With the phase one of project DigiElses underway and 2 more phases to come, this partnership will continue to develop and there is much more to come.