2018 CRN Impact Awards: Nexon Asia Pacific and Essential Services Commission

As Victoria’s independent economic regulator of the electricity, gas, water, transport and local government sectors, the Essential Services Commission provides a wide range of regulatory, compliance, licensing, reporting and audit functions.

Faced by a rapidly disrupting energy industry the commission is improving its regulatory data access and management and creating more efficient processes to contribute to regulatory decision making.

So the commission engaged Nexon Asia Pacific to turn some of its manually operated processes into a fully-digital, centralised, cloud-based platform, to support and manage licensing, compliance and other core regulatory activities.

The solution is CRISP, which leverages Microsoft Dynamics 365 cloud platform to enable high levels of functionality, in a highly-secure environment at relatively low cost.

CRISP is a fully cloud-based solution which provides a platform to support the commission as it explores further enhancements. It also features an external self-service portal which allows energy industry sellers and suppliers to comply with their regulatory obligations more efficiently and effectively.

As a result of CRISP, the commission now has access to data in a clear and managed environment, with inter-related records and strong reporting.

Having an efficient integrated platform for regulatory data means that by combining these rich datasets with other external datasets, the commission can build insight into industry activity and compliance behaviours that have not previously been available. And even as workloads increase, operations have been streamlined through reduced application switching, data re-entry, clunky reporting and analysis.

Project implementation followed a tight timeline. Nexon was awarded the project in June 2017, with the first phase delivered by mid-November that year, and the second phase delivered ahead of schedule in early 2018.

The project implementation was made complex by the commission’s existing environment, including the need to cater for the integration of the HP RM for document management and IBM Notes for email and calendaring.

Also, the regulatory information data model that the commission needed was non-standard, so design of the foundation data model required a full understanding of the end-to-end regulatory process and lifecycle.

Results have been positive. Compliance teams have considered more than 1500 energy industry breaches that have impacted more than a million customers in Victoria. Four previously ‘mission critical’ spreadsheets have been retired, and meaningful reporting and analysis of compliance activities are providing insights into compliance performance of energy industry companies.

The online register provides a completely new stream of regulatory activity, with the introduction of new commercial stakeholders and a consumer-facing public register without any additional increase in staff, and regulatory practices are embedded into the systems and processes through the online portal. The online application and self-management portal is anticipated to avoid around 1000 hours of effort per year for both external parties and commission staff.

Nexon Asia Pacific is a finalist in the 'Digital Transformation' category in the 2018 CRN Impact Awards. For a list of all finalists and further details on the awards, please head to the CRN Impact Awards hub. The awards take place during the CRN Pipeline conference. You can get more information and purchase tickets here.