Tauron Polska Energia, an energy company

Please describe your company.

We’re an energy distributor, and we have roughly 5.5 million customers.

What are your role and responsibilities?

I’m the chief information officer, and I’m responsible for all aspects of IT here.

Could you describe the business challenge that you were trying to address with Boldare?

We have a lot of IT needs. We operate a network using real-time management. The system has a lot of information about system failures. In the energy utility sector, we call that an outage management system. When we have a system failure, we need to track how massive it is and to inform our customers as to when their power will be restored. It’s very important for us to give accurate information to our customers. Together with Boldare, we’ve built some custom solutions between our system and the call center. When the customers call in, the operators are able to give accurate and precise information.

Could you describe the scope of their involvement in detail?

The first project with Boldare was the interface between our system and the call center, which I have already described.

The second project we’ve done with Boldare involved a client login system on our website. Boldare assisted us in building the platform, which is a single sign-on [SSO] solution for about 1.1 million customers.

Boldare worked on mainly the back-end development of these solutions, and they used ESB [enterprise service bus]. They developed the first application using Java. For the SSO platform, I’m not sure of the technology that was used. Boldare has shown themselves to be very flexible in the technologies they use, so during that project, we used a mix of methods.

Could you provide a general cost estimate for these engagements?

I think it was about $300,000 to $350,000 for both projects.

When were the projects completed?

The first project was finished about two or three years ago. The second one was completed two years ago. During that time, we also had them involved with several small tasks and discrete side projects.

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics or user feedback that would demonstrate the quality of their performance?

After the implementation of the system they developed during the first project, the KPI [key [performance indicator] for us was how long it took to provide customers with accurate information about the power outages, and this process has been made much more efficient. We’re talking significant reduction in timetables from collecting our data to being able to convey it to our customers.

For the second project, after the implementation of the SSO, we now have one database for several of the independent services we provide. The time it takes for the customers to access our services is now very short.

They changed project managers in the middle of one of the projects. The first manager we had was very good, but he decided to leave the company after about eight months. However, because they act as a team, there were very few problems when they got a new project manager involved. The cooperation we got from Boldare was very good.

When working with Boldare, is there anything that you’d consider unique about their practice?

Boldare is very detailed in describing their work and letting us know how many hours would be spent on a specific project or task. We were pleasantly surprised, because usually the information our vendors provide us is not as detailed. They’re not cheap, but in the end, the price was justified because the product we got was so good. They gave us a very good price for the quality of the services they provide.

What advice, if any, would you give a future client of theirs?

I would recommend that clients not lock themselves into looking only at vendors who have done work within their sector. If you provide Boldare with information about your business, they will understand what you expect, and they will deliver. You have to be a partner with them. Keep your expectations high, but also listen to them because sometimes they will bring very good proposals to the table that you may not have considered.