The story of EDP Renewables (EDPR) in the US began in 2007 when Horizon Wind Energy was acquired by Lisbon-based Energias de Portugal (EDP). Over the past decade, EDP has embraced the growing demand for clean energy and invested heavily in its renewables business. In that time, EDPR evolved to become one of the largest renewable energy generators in the world.
Business Problem.
EDPR has experienced rapid growth as demand for renewable energy has risen. And fast business growth means the company must manage increased collaboration across a greater number of people, processes, and projects, all while maintaining safe and compliant operations. ESG is one of the many areas in which EDPR has seen increased demand for internal process improvements.
Here are just a few examples of ESG-related challenges EDPR faces:
- Tailoring solutions to multiple different ESG program workstreams and addressing different data types.
- Implementing rapid changes to process and business rules.
- Maintaining a constant chain of custody to ensure accountability.
- Accurately and consistently tracking, reporting, and auditing a spectrum of data, including contractor working hours, social investments, environmental events, waste streams with various units of measurement, and more.
In addition to supporting the ESG goals of its parent company, EDPR also has aggressive growth targets to meet, including a dramatic increase in the number of renewable energy plants constructed each year.
A solution that can adapt, scale, and support new requirements has become a necessity for EDPR to foster growth without hindering production and future expansion.
Appian Solution.
Before Appian, environmental, health, and safety (EHS) incident reporting and response would too often get bottlenecked with one person.
To address their reporting and response bottlenecks related to EHS incidents, EDPR used Appian to build a system called EnHanS that provides case management capabilities. Case managers can send tasks to stakeholders who need to take action to drive the case to resolution. Once this was implemented, the organization starts seeing improved case closure rates.
EnHanS meets the needs of multiple stakeholders and stays up to date with their evolving roles, responsibilities, and requirements. EDPR is also able to add new fields, make customizations, and deploy changes quickly.
With the Appian Low-Code Platform, EDPR has successfully unified data siloed across multiple systems, developed more than 150 applications, and streamlined accurate reporting for ESG functions and many other areas of the business. The Sustainability and Waste Reporting tool alone is worth between 50-75% of an FTE in terms of effort saved. That's just one of 150+ applications in the EDPR environment.
These applications are used by more than 80% of the company across all areas of business, from Asset Operations to Construction to Project Development. In the fast-paced, competitive renewable energy marketplace, low-code has accelerated EDPR’s design and prototyping for internal process improvements, helping end users visualize their processes and work through iterations much more quickly.
Between time savings and mishap avoidance, EDP Renewables has realized an ROI of about ten times their initial Appian investment.
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EDP Renewables
