The world of energy is challenged to shape the energy transition in such a way to achieve a sustainable future. Consumers and companies are increasingly generating their own solar and wind energy, electric transport is growing and energy is increasingly generated and stored locally. These changes have a major impact on the energy supply companies. The energy transition is causing supply and demand to fluctuate significantly and sustainability is crucial, while the energy supply must remain reliable and affordable.

In this changing energy world, energy supply companies are faced with various challenges that also enable them to differentiate themselves. Increasing emphasis is being placed on operational excellence.The energy supply must be managed safely, reliably and affordably, but this task has become complex due to the rapid changes and uncertainties of the energy transition. At the same time, consumers and businesses are becoming increasingly self-sufficient. In order to continue to serve the customer chain collaboration with knowledge institutions, market players, governments and local energy cooperatives to offer solutions for sustainability, flexibility, energy savings and mobility. This also requires committed employees who make sustainable choices in business operations. This imposes a major purchasing function, not only to increase the purchase of sustainable energy, but also to stimulate the construction of sustainable generation, to work with suppliers on sustainability and to procure in a socially responsible way sector-wide. Finally, the challenge is to accelerate the energy transition by stimulating innovation with scalable solutions focused on energy savings and sustainability. Heat supply requires energy savings and data and ICT play an increasingly important role in absorbing the growing fluctuations in supply and demand.

Proposition #1: Chain teams for a customer focus

Every year, a growing number of customers switch to a different energy supplier or grid operator. In 2017, the number of switching customers increased to more than 1.2 million. This requires efficient ways of attracting and retaining good customers and less focus on the switching customer.

Suppliers and grid operators can respond to these fluctuations with a customer-focused and personal approach in order to respond to their customers' needs. In times when solar panels make it possible for customers to generate their own energy, the customer's needs change and so does the role of an energy supplier towards an energy advisor.

This requires a different relationship than the classic supplier-customer relationship. Supply Value has extensive experience in setting up chain collaborations in order to identify customer needs and differentiate themselves from competitors. This focus provides energy suppliers and grid operators with insights into their customer behaviors on which they can act to retain valuable customers and a long-term, sustainable and cost-saving customer relationship.

Experiences of Supply Value

Information about the GVB experience:
Setting up supply chain teams at an operational and tactical level to maximize service from the customer's perspective. Supply Value has put the right people together to identify inefficiencies in service delivery and implement improvement proposals.

Proposition #2: Operational excellence

The entry of many new suppliers in the energy sector has saturated the market in the last few years. As a result, two trends have emerged in recent years, namely an increased number of mergers and acquisitions and a decline in turnover and profit. These developments require the attention of energy suppliers in order to achieve cost reductions through optimization. A cost saving that can be invested at a later stage in the flexibility of energy storage.

With our broad experience in the field of process optimization within different focus areas, companies and industries, we are able to identify and optimize your most important processes. With our self-developed Supply Value model, we uncover the relationships between your strategic goals, processes and organizational structure to identify potential improvements.

This approach focuses on reliability and customer satisfaction. Operational excellence in our vision means that processes internally and towards the customer are efficient and reliable. This applies on two sides, on the one hand customers are less likely to switch to a competitive grid operator or supplier. On the other hand, it leads to cost reductions for the organisation. Supply Value has extensive experience in implementing continuous improvement cycles from optimal customer service to realize cost savings.

Experiences of Supply Value

Information about the NS experience:
Supply Value has implemented a continuous improvement culture at NS in which every layer in the organization contributes to the achievement of the business goals. This has been achieved by determining the right KPIs and realizing a reporting structure in which processes have been optimized with small workgroups to serve the customer optimally.

Proposition #3: Procurement

The energy sector is currently facing a major challenge in the field of procurement. This is due to the increasing shortage on the labour market for high-quality procurement professionals with market knowledge. This tense labour market means that companies have to give greater priority to retaining the existing procurement professionals and keeping them employable. In addition, companies must make extra efforts to attract new procurement professionals. As a result, there is not enough internal capacity with the right procurement expertise to spend time on relevant activities other than tenders/procurement, such as both formulating a good sourcing strategy and continuously improving performance through contract management. While these activities are of great importance to achieve procurement objectives such as cost reduction, risk reduction and value creation.

With our broad and in-depth purchasing knowledge in the field of both savings projects and professionalization projects, we can help you on a project basis, on the basis of effort or result commitment, to achieve your purchasing objectives.

We can do this at all levels (strategic, tactical and operational) either by advising you on specific challenges or by implementing (possibly on the basis of our advice) a process/plan-based renewal or change. On a strategic level by, for example, supporting you in defining your sourcing strategy or helping you to achieve a purchasing strategy (in line with your purchasing policy). This leads to a higher level of focus with the advantage that it is clear to the rest of your (procurement) organization on what you are focusing on. On a tactical level by, for example, setting up contract management, supplier management or category management, further optimizing it or taking it out of your hands. An advantage of contract management is the management of risks. On an operational level, we can optimize processes for you, such as P2P (e.g. by fully automating the process). This leads to cost reductions because less handling time is required.

We prefer to improve processes together with other chain partners, such as suppliers, so that we can help professionalize the chain in addition to your organisation.

Experiences of Supply Value

Proposition #4: Innovation

 Innovation in the energy sector is necessary to accelerate the energy transition to ensure that the Netherlands has a fully sustainable energy supply by the year 2050. In order to accelerate, network operators, energy suppliers and energy producers will have to work closely together and all will have to change. For example, network operators will have to adapt their services, suppliers will have to become energy advisors instead of energy suppliers, and energy producers will only have to produce real green electricity. For a grid operator, for example, this change is necessary in order to keep the energy supply both reliable and affordable. Important preconditions for companies to be able to realize radical changes are to have their own innovative strength and to work together with companies that have a lot of innovative strength, such as start-ups. We can help you with both.

 Mobilizing innovation
We can mobilize the innovative power of the workplace in various ways. One of these ways is "innovation in 5 days". This means that a group of in-house employees, who do not have to deal with the process of innovation on a daily basis, work together for 5 days to achieve radical innovations. We supervise this process. Experience teaches us that this leads to visible results within 1 month.

Another way is "new venture". This means that your organization creates a new business in co-creation. A number of your own employees will temporarily work on a full-time basis in this new venture together with employees of other participants with the aim of creating new business models, new companies or the next big thing. We can help you set up a new venture.

Collaborating with startups
Of course, setting up a new venture is not the only way to collaborate with other organisations within the sector, such as startups. An alternative is setting up a startup network. This leads to new collaborations and investments and thus spreads risks more evenly, making innovation easier to get off the ground. With our expertise in stakeholder management and connecting organizations, we can help you to enter into new collaborations and increase collaboration.

Experiences of Supply Value