Westfalen Weser Energie 
            

Westfalen Weser Energie GmbH & Co. KG., a utility company with headquarters in Paderborn, operates the regional electric, gas and water networks in East Westphalia- Lippe, Weser Uplands and Northern Sauerland. WWE has around 900 employees and supplies more than one million people with power in a region covering 6,400 km². Shares in the municipal utility are held by 56 communities and districts. WWE posted total revenues of around €900 million in 2018.

Global climate change and digital transformation are posing major challenges for companies in the energy and utilities industry, with worldwide pressure for green energy, along with greater requirements for risk management and data protection. The WWE Group is committed to tackling these challenges.

Its unique community-shareholding structure and participating communities’ willingness to invest in their own power grids have enabled the Group’s continued successful growth in recent years. In the process, it has developed into an efficient service provider that offers great service to its end customers—and attractive yields for investors.

Naturally this growth should be recorded in every area and available for continuous improvement. Processes, in particular, must to be documented transparently. Luckily, WWE has been an enthusiastic ARIS customer for 15 years. In 2016 the company decided to make ARIS in the cloud its central management tool—the solution’s first user in Germany!

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

WWE worked together with a variety of service providers and system operators—a complete ecosystem that it must be able to control. To do so, many processes and procedures had to be defined and documented. Due to its shareholding structure new partners are added regularly, so processes must continually be adapted. It’s clear that this process had to be centralized to ensure transparency and a complete overview, in order to achieve optimal efficiency. The solution was a flexible and easy-to-use software solution that maps the current status of projects and responsibilities in real time for all the stakeholders—ARIS.

“To be efficient in this environment, we have to be able to react to changes. To do this, it’s essential that our employees know the different business processes and their interdependencies, and have them under control,” says Alex Kraus, Director of Business Process & Risk Management, WWE.

ARIS delivers this potential. With ARIS, WWE was able to digitally map all its important processes, along with their crucial functions and interfaces. That currently includes 1,800 processes, 1,500 technical documents, 500 integrated IT systems and 960 roles for approximately 900 employees. This process-oriented business map based on ARIS is greater than the sum of its parts. It has created real value for the customer as a strategic digitalization tool: It increased the transparency that enables investment in high-yield energy shareholdings and helps to permanently secure promised dividends for shareholders.

Security and new services

Security and new customer services need to go hand-in-hand to gain customers’ trust over the long term. WWE relies on ARIS to achieve both objectives. ARIS forms the framework for all current and future certifications and offers WWE customers legal certainty on the topic of compliance in general—and specifically on data protection per the GDPR as well as the IT Security Act and its directives. At the same time, WWE can offer its customers new services such as digital grid connections. For instance, the company’s “We 4.0” project aims to digitalize and automate all customer interactions. The prerequisite for the project is the complete digitalization of the company’s documentation, which has already been achieved thanks to ARIS. The paperless office? It’s already part of everyday life at WWE!

An IT co-working space with room for more

ARIS offers its users a process optimization environment with numerous functionalities, including collaboration functions. Every change—and therefore every potential mistake—is captured in an audit trail and the process quality increases significantly. An intuitive user interface makes it clear and easy to use for everyone. Visualization is utilized to invite users to improve processes together—that’s how co-working works in the digital space!

Furthermore, ARIS allows leeway for the integration of countless expansions to achieve a maximum of transparency through process mining . WWE is already thinking ahead and planning the complete integration of its IT planning and risk management in 2020. In addition, the company wants to further improve its customer and service promise through process mining . With ARIS in the cloud, there’s nothing standing in its way.