Company A is a regulated electric utility that provides transmission and distribution services to close to a million homes and businesses in and around a major metropolitan area. It is committed to ensuring that customers receive the highest quality service available and turned to BPM three years ago after evaluating ways to improve the its energy procurement practice.

Why Appian
Company A selected Appian to provide an energy procurement system to address the following challenges:

• Company A's manual RFP process for buying energy was exceedingly expensive
• All pre-bid, bid, and award activities involved extensive use of phone, email, fax, and spreadsheets
• Company A lacked readily available reports to provide visibility into the process for auditors and appointed energy supply supervisors
• The process was error prone; procurement teams spent long hours managing and tracking procurement-related documentation
• The bidding cycle required real-time reconciliation and review of hundreds of bids from multiple suppliers and sources (fax, email, mail), in a very short time period
• Company A realized the high costs associated with attempting to manage risk and increasing workload by adding more manpower
• Any conflicts or clarifications burdened the coordinators with further communication from vendors through email or phone

Implementation Achievements

• Reduced time/cost by about 15% -- automated activities in the solicitation, pre-bid, bid, and award phase
• Compliance is ensured: Excel bids are automatically validated, stored, and ranked. The vendor qualification and EOI process is also automatically enforced
• Centralized repository for all information related to the RFP including pre-bid qualification forms, documents and bids
• Real time reporting on important metrics. Procurement personnel can track status of suppliers compliance and qualification, documents, and incoming bids real time through analytics- powered dashboards and reports
• Supported templates for bids that can be versioned by procurement coordinators
• The system is completely web-based and securely displays relevant content to different stakeholders based on profile, role and access
• Comprehensive audit trails of each procurement cycle. This includes bids, communications with suppliers and all necessary qualification documents and agreements
• Company A reduces time spent on administrative activities and manual data entry. This increases capacity of procurement staff and helps executives focus more on strategic rather that transactional activities

Learn more about Appian's energy solutions by visiting our Energy and Utilities page.