DE Account Handbook - Cognizant Account Handbook.pdf · Cognizant-DE Engagement Snapshot Cognizant entered the DE Business space after the acquisition of HEM • Cognizant’s engagement

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DE Account Handbook

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Direct Energy

Cognizant-DE Engagement Snapshot

Ongoing Projects

Completed projects

Cognizant Initiatives

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Introduction

Browse through following pages, to find a catalog of all the Cognizant-DE associations. At your

perusal are the details of all the projects that Cognizant took responsibility for, circumstances

before Cognizant came into the picture, a brief about the project and the associates working on the

project.

Our onsite representatives, supported by the backbone of our offshore associates, have effortlessly

bridged the gap between Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore thus defining the essence of

Outsourcing and the journey of Cognizant’s relationship with DE. This document also details some

of the key innovations and initiatives undertaken by the Cognizant DE Team.

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DIRECT ENERGY

Direct Energy is wholly owned by Centrica plc, one of the world’s leading integrated energy

companies. In 2013, Centrica served over 30 million customers on both sides of the Atlantic,

operated in seven countries with over 34,000 employees and posted revenues of £26.6bn. Centrica

plc was formed in February 1997 as a result of the Demerger of British Gas plc into Centrica plc

and BG plc. Centrica holds an A- Credit rating (S&P) and a Moody’s Senior Unsecured A3 rating,* is

a Top 30 FTSE 100 company** and a global Fortune 500® company,** and trades on the London

Stock Exchange (CNA).

Direct Energy is one of North America’s largest competitive energy suppliers of electricity, natural

gas and related services. By investing in energy efficiency and innovation, as well as delivering

choices in a variety of retail electricity and natural gas products to home- and business-owners,

Direct Energy is supporting the development of tomorrow’s energy markets today. With

approximately 6,000 employees, we are active in small and medium business; C&I retail business;

as well as home services to ensure we’ll be a stable, long-term partner to the millions of customers

we serve both in the United States and Canada. And by securing innovative partners that offer

products such as the Nest Learning Thermostat, Honeywell Smart Thermostat and Smart Things™,

Direct Energy is on the cutting edge of new energy saving efforts ,

Headquartered in Houston, 12 Greenway Plaza Suite 600 Houston , TX 77046

Direct energy has offices in 46 U.S. states and 10 Canadian provinces.

Direct Energy’s 2014 gross revenues totaled around $19.5 billion.

6 million customer base is the US and Canada

Largest residential energy retailer in North America & Third largest commercial & industrial

retailer in NA

It generates power via natural gas-fired power plants and wind-turbine facilities in Texas,

along with extensive upstream operations in Alberta.

In 2013, Direct Energy produced US$11.4 billion in revenues with an operating profit of US$436 million

Houston Business Journal named Direct Energy as one of the healthiest places in the city to work in 2013, among companies with between 500 and 1,500 employees in the area

Direct Energy has been a proud sponsor of the Volunteer Citizen of the Year award in cities across the country, recognizing local leaders for their contributions to their communities

Along with Pittsburgh Magazine, Direct Energy launched the first-ever Small Business

Community Heroes award to honor small business owners’ efforts to make their city a better

place. This program has expanded across the Northeast.

https://www.directenergy.com/

A History of Impressive Growth as one of North America’s largest competitive energy

retailers.

https://www.directenergy.com/

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Direct Energy operates in 10 Canadian provinces and 46 U.S. states plus the District of

Columbia, with more than 6 million customer relationships.

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DE Operations:

In North America, Direct Energy operates under three lines of business.

Direct Energy Business: For commercial and industrial customers (small, medium and

large-sized businesses, government, public institutions and national accounts), Natural gas

and electricity contracts, along with energy efficiency management and services.

Key facts:

o The largest commercial and industrial retailer in North America based on customer

numbers.

o Natural gas and electricity sales to small, medium and large-size businesses, public

institutions and government.

o Products available in five Canadian provinces and 14 U.S. states, plus the District of

Columbia

Direct Energy Residential: For residential customers, Natural gas and electricity pricing

plans with fixed and variable priced options of varying term lengths. Innovative products

that help control home energy usage, such as the Nest Learning Thermostat, Honeywell

Smart Thermostat and Smart Things.

Key facts:

o Largest residential energy retailer in North America based on customer numbers.

o Innovative products to help manage home energy usage, such as the Nest Learning

Thermostat™

o Honeywell Smart Thermostat and Smart Things.

o Natural gas and electricity pricing plans with fixed and variable price options of

varying term lengths

o Products available in two Canadian provinces and eight U.S. states

Direct Energy Services: For both residential and commercial/industrial customers, our

affiliates, Mr. Sparky, One Hour and Ben Franklin, offer services including HVAC (heating,

ventilation, air conditioning) installation and service, plumbing, water heaters, protection

plans, building automation, facility maintenance, energy audits and energy management

consulting services. We also offer business management and operational counselling to

independent home services contractors.

Key facts:

o One of the largest home services companies in North America

o HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning) installation and service, plumbing,

water heaters, protection plans, building automation, facility maintenance, energy

audits and energy management consulting services. Offers business management

and operational counseling to independent home services contractors

o Products and services available in 10 Canadian provinces and 46 U.S. states, plus

the District of Columbia

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DE Values:

Direct Energy Management Team

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DE IT Organization Chart

DE_IT_OrgChart.pdf

2014 Year-End Financial Results

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Family of Brands: Direct Energy

Key Points:

WTU: Fixed rates, variable plans, green energy, prepaid, or even natural gas-sourced

electricity plans.

FCP : Offers customers a range of electricity plans with competitive prices designed in

Texas for DER and DEB

CPL : Offers fixed rates, variable plans, green energy, prepaid, and even natural gas-

sourced electricity plans

Bounce energy :Low competitive rates in New York

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NYSEG Solutions : Provides electricity and natural gas supply, green energy, Renewable

Energy Credits (RECs), and energy related products and services to customers

Energet!x : Provides electricity, natural gas, and clean energy solutions to DER & DEB in

NY.

Newleaf : Renewable energy to billing options, green energy, eco-friendly billing options-

including Auto-Pay and Paperless

Gateway : To DER & DEB deregulated markets customers across Kentucky, Maryland, New

Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the District of Columbia

Vectren source :One of the largest retail providers of electricity, natural gas, and home

services in NA

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Cognizant-DE Engagement Snapshot

Cognizant entered the DE Business space after the acquisition of HEM

• Cognizant’s engagement with DER is since 2005

• The key services offered to DER so far are application development, support and maintenance,

Mobile app development strategy, BI assessment etc.

• Currently from Cognizant the strength of employees working for DE at both shores is in the

range of around 95+

• In October 2013, DE acquired Hess Energy marketing business (HEM) whom Cognizant has

had the prior engagement with.

Cognizant presence in Direct energy

DE Operations Cognizant Present Active Project Name

Direct Energy Residential Yes

DER - Tulsa Production Support

Texas Platform Consolidation

Tibco Production Support

US North production Support

DE - Digital Transformation

MIS App Support

DE Houston DW Development

DE Residential-Functional Testing

Tableau Upgrade & Dashboard Development

DER Functional testing

IT IS DBA

DE Functional Testing

Direct Energy Business Yes

DEB-HEM Pricing Systems

DEB-HEM Datamart

DEB-HEM Billing Interface Sys

DEB-HEM Scheduling-Trading

DEB-HEM Testing Services

DEB-HEM MDM

DEB Risk Warehouse

DE SFDC Training

DEB Apollo Modernization

Direct Energy Services No NA

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Ongoing Projects

Tulsa Production Support

Business Unit:

MLEU

Customer Contact

Mantle, Jon

Project description

Direct Energy has a suite of IT applications on a variety of technologies that assist and propel the

business in both strategic and operational directions. This includes consolidated PEACE 8.08

application of Direct Energy’s residential and small commercial customers in the state of Texas and

Peace Ontario applications.

Scope of the services is as follows,

Job monitoring activities (Texas and Ontario)

Application access control

Analysis on incident ticket on the following areas

o Non-Peace – Interfaces ( Texas and Ontario)

o Batch applications

o Online applications

o Ancillary applications

o Ontario Ancillary applications

o Service oriented applications

o Reports via Reporting Framework

Enhancement Activities includes

o Code development

o Unit testing

Providing support for Quality Assurance

o Component testing.

o Fully Integration testing.

Gathering Infrastructure requirements and documentation.

Project implementation and Go-live activities.

Post Go-live support.

Production support Hand over document

Technology used

Item Name Software

Operating System Windows

Database Oracle 11

Application Server IIS

Technologies ASP.NET 3.5, JSP, Web services, Struts, Core

Java

Tools WinSCP, PuTTY, Visual studio, Soap UI, Eclipse

Key benefits

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A highly robust and scalable integration platform for integration between

systems

Clear visibility on the monitoring and tracking the market transactions

Enhanced Efficiency by reducing Manual intervention across failure points with the

introduction of reconciliation process

Stabilization of production interfaces by drilling down the issue root case and

provide permanent solution

Proactive monitoring on the production components and effective action prior to

the customer impact thru alerting

Associates involved in the project

Onsite:

Vinod Kumar Nakka

Offshore:

Arkaprovo Basak

Shahul Hameed Raja Abdul Razack

Sudhakar Joseph Solomon

Ranjan RamanujamVijayaraghavan

Priyavashini N

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Texas Platform Consolidation

Business Unit:

MLEU

Customer Contact

Mantle, Jon

Project description

Direct Energy has a suite of IT applications on a variety of technologies that assist and propel the

business in both strategic and operational directions. This includes consolidated PEACE 8.08

application of Direct Energy’s residential and small commercial customers in the state of Texas and

Peace Ontario applications.

Scope of the services is as follows,

Analysis on new requirements and Change Requests on the following areas

o Non-Peace – Interfaces ( Texas and Ontario)

o Batch applications

o Online applications

o Ancillary applications

o Ontario Ancillary applications

o Service oriented applications

o Reports via Reporting Framework

Development Activities includes

o Design document creation (Software Design Specification)

o Code development

o Unit testing

Providing support for Quality Assurance

o Component testing.

o Fully Integration testing.

o Third party vendor testing.

o User Acceptance testing.

o Resolution of defects identified during the QA

Gathering Infrastructure requirements and documentation.

Project implementation and Go-live activities.

Post Go-live support.

Production support Hand over document

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Technology used

Item Name Software


Database Oracle 11


Technologies ASP.NET 3.5, JSP, Web services, Struts, Core

Java

Tools WinSCP, PuTTY, Visual studio, Soap UI, Eclipse

Major projects (Peace Interfaces, Online applications)

FISERV

Direct Energy currently uses third party vendor FIS to transmit, collect and store CC information.

With this project, Direct Energy will now be transitioning from FIS to Fiserv all its payment

processing activities. Walk-in vendor functionality with Fiserv will continue to be maintained.

Fiserv will be used to transmit, collect and store customer related credit card information

Fiserv will be used to process daily recurring credit card payments

Fiserv will also able to receive real time payments and utilize Direct Energy API(s) to post

real time in peace.

Auto Pay customer accounts will be created in Fiserv that will have an account number

which matches the DE Customers debtor number stored in CIS

The debtor number will therefore be the link between DE customer information and Fiserv

CC information for that customer

Fiserv is the system of record for CC information

DE is the system of record for all other customer information

Account summary tool

This tool is used to view the customer account summary details such as account summary,

statement summary and tariff summary. This tool will allow the back office people to send

these details as PDF to customer EMAIL ID.

Time of Use (TOU)

This interface will process the interval usage information from smart meter repository

database of an ESI ID for a service period and generating a file using the interval data. And

there is an dashboard, which will process the given ESI ID , service period details and free

power day to display the sum of interval usage information as well as a download option to

get the interval data in a file.

QA web tool

To cross verify the amount in PEACE tables against the invoice generated to customer.

User will enter the amount which is in invoice PDF in the tool against the Invoice #.

Difference between the PEACE value and the value entered is not 0, then the amount in the

invoice PDF is wrong. So again the invoice should generate with the correct amount as per

the reading.

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InAdvertent Switch Application (IAS)

Inadvertent Switch Application is used by DE users to track the status of the IAS Issues.

An Inadvertent switch could happen simply by someone accidentally providing an incorrect

address when setting up electricity service.

These are created as IAS issues & being tracked in IAS application until it is resolved.

IAS issues that are logged in Peace are staged into IAS tables and displayed in the front

end.

Users can edit the IAS details & change the IAS status.

This application also generates report & provides the detailed view of the open & closed

tickets.

Key challenges/Learnings

Getting knowledge on PEACE tables.

Learned to export a whole page into excel format. The page contains a grid view with

server controls inside the grid and the values are dynamically binding along with

summary section at the top of the page.

User enters value in text box, the page will get reloads. If user place the cursor on

some other text box or tab it, after page reloads the focus should be in the text box

where the user placed the cursor.

Getting knowledge on the Domain.

Key benefits

Most of the applications are running as batch process and works

automatically.

Old applications are converted to .Net 4.0 framework.


Onsite:

1. Raajagopal Srinivasan

2. Chittilapilly Anoop-George

Offshore:

1. Sivasubramaniam Dhilip Kumar

2. Srinivasan Vasantharaj

3. Soni Rahul

4. Rajendran Dhiyaneshwaran

5. Hussain Dawood

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TIBCO Support

Business Unit:

ASP – BPI

Customer Contact

McClure, Tim

Project description

One of North America’s largest energy suppliers of electricity, gas and related home

services.

Market leader in providing utility based services targeting the residential and commercial

customers.

The goal of the project is to build and implement a single standard architecture for all

integration solution is required for the Client’s Business need

Integrate many messages from different Applications, Trading Partners involved in

enrollment process and other promotion features of our Client

Technology used:

TIBCO BW 5.6

TIBCO EMS 5.1

TIBCO BC 5.2

Oracle 11G


This project provides solution to cover all the enrollment process, adherence to

market and promotional offers to customers

Timely response on the market transaction issues and resolve them within market

SLA timeframe

Maintenance and monitoring the systems to ensure that any abnormal behavior is

identified and fixed without impacting the deadlines.

Reduced time on enhancement supports by making the changes more generic and

less impacts to other interacting systems

Provides a clear model to integrate software systems inside the enterprise (entities

and sites) and across organizational boundaries with organizations

Key benefits


systems


Enhanced Efficiency by reducing Manual intervention across failure points with the

introduction of reconciliation process

Stabilization of production interfaces by drilling down the issue root case and

provide permanent solution

Proactive monitoring on the production components and effective action prior to

the customer impact thru alerting


Onsite:

Satish Bhamidipati

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Offshore:

Rajamahanthi Anup Kumar

S Sivakami

Further readings

DE MIS Data Apps Support

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Business Unit: EIM

Customer Contact: Venkatraman Siva

Project description

1. Includes ETL scripts related to the following applications

Scripts are executed through jobs scheduled in Control-M scheduling application

There is no monitoring requirement to check status on Control M. In case of

failures/issues, an automated email notification is sent to the support team for

subsequent action

The jobs run Monday-Friday in the week. No weekend run/support required

Development and Enhancement of SSIS packages and SSRS/BOBJ reports

2. Corrective maintenance & Production Support of SSIS jobs and packages for the listed

applications

3. Monitor all error notifications and take actions if needed OR involve appropriate groups

accordingly. Resolution time would vary based on the criticality of failure from same day

to 1-2 business days

4. Communicate issues/resolution options/other required actions directly with DE business

teams over email. If required coordinate with DE business analyst for resolution

5. Analyzing the ticket, and work with Direct Energy DBA support team to perform any

configuration related work around to the issue reported.

6. Perform root cause analysis to provide a permanent fix to the issue

7. Continue to identify areas of improvements for optimizing performance

8. Documentation updates of all program specifications and business analysis documents

will be completed by Cognizant based on those programs that Cognizant and Direct

Energy change as a part of the application support.

9. Work on new enhancements/changes as requested

10. In addition, when there is no job failure related activities, the resources can be utilized

for other ETL related work as assigned by DE SMEs

11. Follow the software lifecycle model to handle the development projects and change

request requirements.

12. Provide support for any environment migration with the DBA team.

Technology used:

Item Name Software

Operating System HPUX, Windows

Database Oracle 10g, SQL server


Technologies Microsoft SSIS, SSRS and SAP BO 4.0

Tools SVN, TFS, PL/SQL developer, Eclipse,

Visual studio, MS Office

Key benefits

Many process which were manual are now made automatic

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Getting knowledge of all the applications


Onsite:

Sriram VenkataKrishnan

Offshore:

Sivalingam Prakash

Sminju Samuel

Chandramouli

Gokulakrishanan

Janarthanan

Vivek

Further readings

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US North Production Support

Business Unit:

MLEU

Customer Contact

Scott Choddor

Project description

One of North America’s largest energy suppliers of electricity, gas and related home

services.

Market leader in providing utility based services targeting the residential and commercial

customers.

We perform Production Support activities for the IT team of the US North Production

Support team based in Tulsa. Activities supported by us include Customer Enrollments,

Billing and Invoicing, POR/NON-POR Payment Posting, Letter Writer, CRT, Reports and

other processes. We have also built several helper applications with the aim of cutting

down the number of support tickets we get weekly and have had great success with it

too.

EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is the format we follow in this project for file

transactions.

Technology used

VB .Net2.0/ 3.5, SQL Server 2008 R2, EDI, DevEx Controls, Crystal Reports


We work on almost all areas of Production Support but the key challenge that we

have faced is customer's reluctance to expand in the area of Development due to two

reasons.

1. The development center is Montebello and customer wants all Development

work to be done there only.

2. Budgetary constraints do not allow for increasing headcount in the project in

the short/long term.

Key benefits


systems


We have value adds in the application which reduces user manual work

tremendously


Onsite:

Aaruni Upadhyay

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Nilesh Rai

Offshore:

Deepa M S

Jeyavani A

Further readings

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Encore

Business Unit:

MLEU

Customer Contact

Cindy Farley

Project description

Encore is a windows application that is primarily used for proposal management of

Natural gas customers. It interfaces with Apollo which is an application used for maintaining

existing customers and their active deals. Proposals created for prospect customers are moved

to Apollo once they are converted to active deals by which the prospect customers become

actual customers. Proposals of both prospect and non-prospects customers are renewed

automatically by the system on a daily basis in Encore. Encore was initially called as Customer

renewals. The basic functionality of Encore was to renew deals and create prospect customers

in Apollo. A proposal is created for an existing customer whose deal is going to expire or for a

new customer. Renew proposals are done for an existing customer / Active Deal.

Technology used:

Visual Studio 2010, VB.NET

CSLA

OpenXML

Sql Server 2008

Key benefits

Proposal creation has done only for retail customers

Confirmed proposals only moved to Apollo, which reduces overhead of billing

application(Apollo) to maintain deals and proposals

Customer setup done in Encore so the billing application don’t want to maintain

customers info

Various types of proposals and deal sheets can be created with the help of Encore,

which reduces the effort of sales representative to arrive many proposals for one

customer before make it to deal


This project provides solution to cover all the enrollment process for customers

Business rules are clearly defined with the help of open source component CSLA

Reduces the overhead of billing application to maintain customer and proposals info.

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Reduced time on enhancement supports by making the changes more generic and

less impacts to other interacting systems


Onsite:

N Sudarshanan

Offshore:

S Thanigaivel

M Murali

E Swathi

Further readings

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Genesis

Business Unit:

MLEU

Customer Contact

Padmaja Boppana

Project description

Direct Energy needed an integrated system that is robust and user friendly to

handle their day to day operations like Pricing and Proposal generation. Genesis is a

Proposal Management System and acts as a common platform for the below four groups

Sales Support, Electric OPS, Wholesale Desk and Contract Admin, Support User. Its

functionalities are like Proposal workflow management for tracking purposes, Defined

process across all the involved teams, complete system automation, Flexibility to configure

the pricing module, Configurable user roles and rights management. The project

development was completed over a period of 3 months with 7 resources at offshore and 1

resource at onsite. The application moved to production in September 2009.

Technology used:

Item Name Software


Database SQL server


Technologies .Net 4.0,ASP.Net, VB.Net, WCF,

NHibernate, MVC, HTML ,JavaScript,

JSON,MS SQL 2008,Enterprise Library

Open XML

Tools Visual Studio 2010,SQL Server 2008

Key benefits

Proposal creation has been done for Retail and also Wholesale Customers

Initiation of price request (Both New and Renew) and workflow

Price is forwarded to the customer for approval

Forwarding the confirmation to Electric OPS for finalization after obtaining

approval from the customer

Forwarding any supporting documents to Electric OPS and Contract Admin

for closure of the workflow

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Performing hedging for finalized proposals

Validating the workflow and providing comments


This project is using the latest version of .net and other technologies.

Proposed various enhancements that lead to both performance improvement as well

as customer satisfaction.


Onsite:

Vijayakanthan Vijayakumar

Amaresh Narayanappa

Baalaji Govindaraj

Offshore:

Vaishnav Kasi

Meganathan

Jessica Neena

Renuka

Hariharan Packirisamy

Veeramuthu Prabhu

Balaji Murugan

Kumaresan D

KarthikKumarsha

Dinesh

Further readings

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Cognizant Initiatives

Below is some important list of innovation that cognizant did for DE Projects,

DE-Product Analytics Dashboard: Texas being a regulated market Direct Energy was

designing and launching many innovative products to attract more customers through different

programs. Incremental addition of new product offerings leads to the following problems in

managing them. To resolve this team came up with a Dashboard to provide a consolidated view

using Vertical Coordinates Chart from Visualization platform. This dashboard process the data

of all launched products and attributes to make a simple summary to the end user for taking

necessary actions.

Customer Churn Analytics: DE faced with increased customer attrition and needed to identify

key parameters affecting customer churn for each business division. Customer churn is the loss

of customers who may leave based on a number of reasons including pricing issues, new

Product Offerings, Automatic Contract Renewals customer service, competitor Offers .To

analyze the above trends we developed a multivariate analytical model which will be used for

future churn prediction also identify the key drivers of churn in each business division using

delivery, assurances, billing data and satisfaction data

List of innovation that cognizant did for DE Projects in the year 2014

Cognizant_Inovation_Initiatives_2014.xls

Documents

DE Account Handbook - Cognizant Account Handbook.pdf · Cognizant-DE Engagement Snapshot Cognizant entered the DE Business space after the acquisition of HEM • Cognizant’s engagement