Providing electricity service at level 4 has brought many advantages to customers
1. An inevitable journey
EVN is an enterprise with the traditional industry of electricity, a profession with more than 100 years of development; facing the transformation of the economy, of the country, whether there will be digital transformation or not. There are many influencing factors that motivate EVN to conduct digital transformation:
- On 3 June 2020, the Prime Minister approved the "National digital transformation program to 2025, with a vision to 2030", defining energy as one of eight priority areas for digital transformation.
- The COVID-19 pandemic broke out in early 2020 and may be prolonged, when Vietnam implemented its policies on social distancing, the need to use digital-based services becomes even more essential. Thanks to good information technology - telecommunications infrastructure, smooth management and management information, EVN's production, business and investment activities have not been delayed as well ass maintained in good development. This is an advantage factor, it should continue to promote.
- Global climate change, warnings of environmental degradation, depletion of fossil resources, and rapid progress in energy industry technology are leading to a drastic shift in energy structure over the years, recently. In particular, the penetration of renewable energy is increasingly high, by the end of 2020 the total capacity of solar and wind power sources is nearly 17,000MW, accounting for more than 25%, of which distributed power sources such as solar power the roof connected to the system has exceeded the number of 100,000 projects. This is a huge challenge to the safe and reliable operation of the national power system without new solutions for monitoring and control.
- EVN's partners (banks, suppliers, contractors, etc.) and regulators are performing digital transformation, so they require EVN to connect and provide services to their digital ecosystems, public services, payment services, tax services, etc.)
- Customers' digital technology capacity and demands for utilities are increasing, requiring EVN's products and services to ensure quality, reliability and transparency. The current smartphone using rate in Vietnam is about 50% (*) and it is expected that Vietnam will universalize the use of smartphones by 2025.
- The maturation of new digital technologies (AI, Bigdata, Cloud, Blockchain, etc.) with the change in ways of solving many complicated problems has led to the formation of new production and business models.
- Electricity sectors in countries with strong digital transformation, especially developed countries, would be difficult for EVN to catch up and integrate them without breakthrough changes.
Through the above factors, it can be said that digital transformation is both a demand and an indispensable requirement in the development process of EVN.
2. EVN's three phases of digital transformation
There are many different perspectives and approaches to divide the digital transformation phases. For EVN, we can divide the digital transformation into 3 phases:
Phase 1: Maximizing each functional department, starting with core activities and then spreading it to all other activities. Basically, EVN went through this stage with the creation of many separate IT systems serving different functional departments such as ERP, CMIS, EVNHES, HRMS, Digital Office, IMIS, PMIS, OMS, and so on. At the member units of EVN, a few tens to hundreds of information systems are also used to serve their different needs.
The National Power System is equipped with modern equipment, minimizing the on-duty manpower
Phase 2: Integrating information systems to improve business performance. Through the digitization process, information systems become more and more fragmented, leading to the need of integration to share information among departments. The establishment of monitoring and control centers, the collection and integration of data to serve management reports are typical examples of this stage. During this period, although the information was transmitted smoothly among departments, the operational efficiency has improved, but has not yet made a breakthrough in the management, production and business models. The digital transformation of EVN can now be viewed at this stage.
Phase 3: Utilizing the power of data and new digital technologies to digitize and comprehensively exploit management, production and business activities to save costs, speed up workflow, improve productivity labour, increase reliability and safety in production and operation of the power system; providing convenient and transparent services to customers on a digital platform; at the same time contribute to and create a driving force for the economic and social development of the country. At this stage, EVN shall take advantage of its extremely large amount of data, applies new digital technologies (AI, Bigdata, Cloud, Blockchain...), resulting in changes in old operating models, no longer suitable for forming new models, for instance, distributed renewable energy forecasting model, predictive maintenance solutions, changing customer care center models, and so on.
3. Strategic steps
In order to overpass stage 2, entering phase 3 on its digital transformation journey, EVN has been taking the following steps:
- EVN’s Member Board directs the development of strategy and approves a master plan for digital transformation, helping to orientate and guide on the entire digital transformation process in the entire EVN.
- EVN requires the direct participation by EVN’s Deputy General Directors in charge of fields, heads of functional departments, heads of member units and all employees in the digital transformation program.
- Developing modern ICT infrastructure, innovating technology architecture in a flexible direction (Agile + Devops).
- Strengthening solutions to ensure information safety and security.
- Developing policies that are willing to accept changes, accept the new aspects; Once digital technology is adopted, there will probably a change in processes, ways of working, even organizational structure.
- Developing and attract high-quality digital technology human resources, especially human resources for data analysis and processing, platform architecture, human resources in AI.
- Strengthen training in awareness of and improve digital technology capacity for all employees.
In 2021, the theme "Digital transformation in the Vietnam National Electricity Group" was selected by EVN's Board of Members, this is really a tectonic year for EVN to make a breakthrough in digital transformation for the following years.