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Award winning contract delivery in public sector

By Talk Power Team | Posted May 26, 2022

On 25 May 2022, EDF won Best Contract Delivery at the 2022 national GO Excellence in Public Procurement Awards for our collaborative onboarding project with Crown Commercial Service (CCS). We’re so proud of this achievement, our teams involved, and the project itself, we wanted to tell you all about it…

 

A significant growth project

In April of 2020, EDF were awarded an agreement with CCS that would double the number of their energy supplies we look after to over 53,000. Over the course of 12 months, during unprecedented world events, we worked in partnership with CCS to create a smooth transfer and onboarding for these customers.

Transferring 25,000 meters between suppliers is no small feat and, if managed poorly, can have significant impact on the end users – costing valuable time, disruptions to billing, and a headache the end user doesn’t need.

Managed well, it can greatly benefit everyone involved and open the door to a vastly improved relationship between supplier and end customer.

 

A huge undertaking requires a big team!

This was our biggest ever single change of supply event, covering around 450 end users and 25,000 supply points. Customers ranged from having 1 MPAN to c5,000 to manage. And 200 of those end users were completely new to EDF, so needed to be set up from scratch and introduced to all our processes and systems.

To do this we formed joint working group, with our own internal team growing to more than 60 people across a wide range of operations.

 

We then designed our service plans 

It needed to be a strong collaborative effort between EDF, CCS and the outgoing supplier to ensure an aligned and well-structured engagement approach that caused the least disruption to end users.

The last thing a customer needs is to be receiving conflicting or confusing messages!

 

Keeping the end users informed of progress and next steps

We all agreed that one of the most important aspects was to keep end users engaged throughout – aware of what was happening, when, who was doing it, the impact on them, and what expectations there were of them. At no point did we want a customer to feel unsure if they were meant to be doing something.

So, we created a program of communication activity through a series of action-oriented emails and updates, regular webinars (live and on-demand so no-one misses out), dedicated resource webpages with regular updates and actions, as well as dedicated contacts.

In order to give customers greater visibility of their transfer, we also invested in online dashboards and enhancements to our digital platform MyBusiness. This was hugely beneficial to customers to view site lists, transfer status, query management and to run reports themselves.

 

Overcoming challenges

Data was always going to be key! So we engaged early on to support customers in reviewing, validating, cleansing their estate data prior to the transfer. This helped allow time for action to be taken and for us to best support the customers through what they needed to do.

Whilst not visible to the customer, getting MOPs, DCs & DAs engaged and aligned in the approach was vitally important to the success of the project. 25,000 MPANs needed data flows to be sent and received for each to make sure we had accurate meter and reading information. In total this was around 225,000 flows and exchanges of data.

 

The end result…

A typical change of supplier process of even a fraction of this size, would consider a transfer rate of c.95% as positive. EDF achieved 98.7% successful registrations by the target of 1 April 2021 and hit 100% just a few weeks later.

 

Dedicated to the public sector

EDF works with the UK’s biggest public sector procurement agencies to cut the cost and workload involved in purchasing electricity for over 1,100 public sector organisations (including charities and NGOs, central and local government, universities and the NHS) with over 90,000 supplies.

Our strong, collaborative relationships with each public sector framework operator helps us to meet their complex requirements and to put the needs of their customers first.

By continuously investing in and enabling access to zero carbon energy and technology, we’re here to support Britain's businesses and public sector on their journey to achieve Net Zero.