According to Mr. Nguyen Van Thanh, the digital transformation of EVNHCMC has certain advantages, thanks to its team of excellent, well-trained, experienced technicians and IT staff who are capable of mastering advanced technologies. On the other hand, EVNHCMC has had many years of active application of science and technology in almost all aspects of its operations.
EVNHCMC's Remote Control Center, which was established in 2017, is the first remote control center in Vietnam Electricity (photo taken before 27 April 2021) – Photo: M. Huong
Its digitization was initially started by EVNHCMC in the 2000s in some areas of operation. In business and customer service, EVNHCMC had applied information technology to manage customer information, to manage electricity meter readings and electricity bills via software. Since then, customer data and information began to be managed systematically and gradually changed the power business method.
Connecting with banks to set up a collecting electricity bills system is a typical example. It is considered the first digitization application, which has changed the way customers transact with the power industry. Customers can pay electricity bills at any transaction point of utilities and any partner bank regardless of areas of electricity use.
A complete customer database and complete connection of information technology network were the reasons why EVNHCMC was selected to pilot the application of e-invoices to every of more than two million customers and that has been successfully implemented since 2013. That was also the initial foundation for EVNHCMC to deploy online customer services later.
EVNHCMC has now deployed documents and electricity service contract management in electronic form; implemented electronic transactions of 100% of electricity services; provided 100% online electricity service level 4 on the National Public Service Portal, the Public Administration Portal of Ho Chi Minh City; built many customer communication channels in cyberspace such as website, zalo, application Customer Service App in mobile devices. Currently, the Corporation is using artificial intelligence (Al) to gradually improve the chatbot (automatic reply) on the customer service website.
In technical management, since 2010, EVNHCMC has developed centralized management software such as grid material and equipment management, power outage management, operation management, from which to gradually build a complete data system on the city's power network as a basis for investment decisions to modernize the power system and develop advanced operational management processes.
The Corporation has now digitized the entire technical management such as digitizing the operation management of the entire city's power network, making electronic operation logs with power outage management software, electrical repair monitoring, online safety monitoring. In particular, the digitization of the power network based on GIS maps is also connected to serve the construction of the City's Urban Operations Center as well as exploiting the city's shared spatial data.
EVNHCMC has also implemented remote control and unmanned operation for 100% of its 110kV substations; 100% of its medium voltage grid is remotely controlled, of which 50% is fully automated; the percentage of successful remote operations of the power network is higher than 99%, the percentage of incident reroutings shorter than five minutes is higher than 81%.
In 2020, EVNHCMC completed and put into operation a Datacenter with the most advanced technical standards, serving as the foundation for the application of artificial intelligence (Al) and big data in the digital transformation of the Corporation.