Text and Photos by AboitizPower
Technology has drastically shaped the way companies do business and interact with their stakeholders. For Aboitiz Power Corporation (AboitizPower), advancements in data science and artificial intelligence (DSAI) have fueled its business intelligence capabilities, from accelerating its customer service levels to establishing robust data analytics practices and ultimately simplifying the way the company conducts business.
As AboitizPower, one of the country’s leaders in the power industry, embarks on its digital transformation journey, and it moves purposefully with the goal of continuously delivering better products and services to its customers.
The company’s Commercial Operations Business Unit is at the forefront of this journey. This arm of AboitizPower takes charge of the trading and sales of the company’s generation capacities, delivering power directly to businesses, utilities, and other customers. In support of energy trading and sales, the different teams of this Business Unit lead other business-critical functions, including portfolio management and power systems planning. Recognizing the opportunity to continuously improve its processes and services for customers, the Business Unit has made significant strides as an innovator and early adopter of data science practices and utilization in its various functions.
Improved efficiency
In their day-to-day operations, the Commercial Operations teams utilize platforms and data science best practices to eliminate time-consuming processes, reducing the back-and-forth required to provide and analyze data. As the group that serves at the front lines of customer interactions, the application of these tools allows the commercial team to reduce overall turnaround and improve the negotiation experience for the customer. From a customer journey standpoint, businesses are empowered by the information made available to them in real-time, making space for more business-critical activities that they need to tend to.
The Business Unit has also been working on a new energy trading platform that uses advanced analytics and trading optimization technologies to support its trading operations, further enhancing data analysis and efficiency wherever possible. The implementation of this system supports the Philippine electricity market’s demand for fast exchanges of plant-related information and helps ensure that AboitizPower’s generation facilities trade power with the highest levels of accuracy, comply with stringent market rules, and optimize margins based on data-driven trading strategies.
Smart analysis and energy products that create value
Beyond improvements in efficiency and accuracy of data, adopting best practices in data science also supports the group in synthesizing information to build meaningful insights and inspire ideas to reinvent the customer experience. AboitizPower recently partnered with UnionBank’s Data Science and Artificial Intelligence team to build tools that leverage data science models as a way to expand the company’s knowledge of its customer base and help build long-term solutions for their business.
The Commercial Operations team is aware of the need to deepen their understanding of user outcomes using data science techniques. These methodologies allow the team to collect vast amounts of data which are integral in analyzing the energy consumption behavior of various industries along with other useful energy-related information — their energy profile and pain points, how they can practice energy efficiency, saving on costs by avoiding potential failure points in their electrical equipment, and so on. The insights gathered then become the starting point for AboitizPower to design tailor-fit energy products and solutions that are most suitable to the customer’s business needs and contribute to their competitiveness in their respective industries.
Additionally, the development of other smart tools also drives improvements in forecasting accuracy and speed of data processing. This is crucial in enhancing the quality and agility in decision-making for critical operational aspects that impact both AboitizPower and its customers. Ultimately, critical data points such as demand and short-term price forecasts help the Business Unit, and its customers anticipate and minimize risks of volatile market conditions and unexpected economic scenarios, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Through a robust array of solutions curated by its Customer Solutions team, AboitizPower also continues to leverage further technological advancements that enable customers to improve, optimize, and digitize their operations.
Sandro Aboitiz, AboitizPower Head of Commercial Operations, shared the Business Unit’s purpose in their digital journey. “In Commercial Operations, we encourage an innovative mindset within the group in order to come up with unique ideas to give what our customers need even before they ask. We remain committed to our goal of being the partner of choice for the customers we serve, always aiming to go above and beyond our services levels and constantly seeking new ways of serving our customers through data science and other automation tools.” he said.
Dr. David Hardoon, Senior Advisor for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at UnionBank and Chair of Data Committee at Aboitiz Group, also highlighted: “The purpose of such data science endeavors is customer centricity. Improved forecasting enables AP COBU to deliver consistent customer service while optimizing operational efficiency.”
The company continues to drive innovation, and through this, strengthens its commitment to being the customers’ partner of choice. With the help of innovations in DSAI, including its projects with UnionBank and the rest of the Aboitiz Group, customers can be assured that AboitizPower, along with its Commercial Operations Business Unit, will continue to cater to their needs as a reliable, affordable, and sustainable power provider for years to come.
