Application Integration Success Story

ENMAX

ENMAX Corporation (ENMAX) is an energy distribution, supply and service company that operates and competes in Alberta’s restructured electricity industry. A wholly owned subsidiary of The City of Calgary, ENMAX is headquartered in Calgary, AB, Canada.

Challenge

ENMAX operates in a highly competitive business environment and having access to accurate and timely customer information is critical to the success of their organization. A key challenge for ENMAX was they lacked a complete customer list and valuable information about products and services purchased by their current customers. This lack of information prevented the sales and marketing group from appropriately targeting the current customer base, which in turn would enable ENMAX to expand revenues through the cross selling of products. ENMAX also realized the ability to leverage their existing customer base could give them a key competitive advantage over newcomers in the market.

Solution

Ideaca worked with ENMAX to implement a Customer Integration Architecture (CIA) that synchronized 300,000 customer records between their operational and CRM systems using Microsoft's BizTalk Server Product. Ideaca was able to create an Enterprise Bus Architecture using Microsoft BizTalk server and the Microsoft.Net Framework. This integration allowed ENMAX to have a more complete view of their customers as a number of disparate systems could utilize the Bus to subscribe to and publish key parts of customer records. The intelligence behind the Enterprise Bus Architecture was managed in an XML based Business Rules Engine that allowed ENMAX staff to implement business processes without the need for IT support. Integrating their customer information systems was the first major application integration project at ENMAX and despite having to overcome considerable technical challenges, the Ideaca team delivered a seamless solution.

Benefits

The Customer Integration Architecture project has allowed ENMAX to realize the following benefits:

  • Better execution of overall customer relationship management through access to accurate and complete customer information
  • Increased ability to cross sell and up sell to the existing customer base
  • Improved organizational efficiencies due to streamlined business processes