Essent partners with Levi9 for large technology transformation in B2B division

31 January 2025 Consultancy.eu

Energy company Essent worked with IT consultancy Levi9 on a major digital transformation aimed at enhancing its B2B services. Levi9 delivered the project through a cross-border team of consultants and technologists from its offices in Serbia and the Netherlands.

For over 90 years, Essent provides gas, electricity, heat, and energy services to consumers and businesses across the Netherlands.

Facing a number of notable challenges in its main B2B billing, contracting, and onboarding system, the company’s management team launched a digital transformation program to improve processes, IT architecture and applications. The energy group brought Levi9 on board as its consulting partner.

Illustrating the case for change, Essent’s old platform was a cumbersome Java monolith application containing more than 1 million lines of code. It required an expensive team of 100+ employees and freelancers to maintain and adapt and hundreds of people to manage the B2B services. The entire platform, and the process to run and maintain it, was expensive, inflexible, and not responsive towards innovation.

Teaming up with Levi9

Levi9 kicked off the project with an advisory assessment. Experts from its team in Serbia conducted the assessment, and presented the technical analysis to Essent. Building on that basis, improvement areas were identified, and a 4-year roadmap was created, balancing short-term goals such as quick-wins with long-term objectives.

“Levi9 brought a lot of advanced technical capabilities and we brought critical aspects as well from our side. We were all open to learn from each other,” said Kim Terpstra, Head of Product and Agile Transformation at Essent. “Communicating with trust and openness was key, which helped establish a transparent and collaborative approach from the start.”

The primary outline of the new strategy was to smoothly transition the legacy monolithic architecture to an AWS-hosted microservices landscape. Another key initiative was to cultivate a DevOps culture to facilitate team ownership of the system's operation.

Key benefits set for the program included decreasing operational costs by 25%, improving the B2B customer platform, reducing time-to-market, and ensuring higher platform reliability, stability, and security.

Essent partners with Levi9 for large technology transformation in B2B division

The implementation

Ove the course of the roughly 1-year implementation process, joint Essent and Levi9 teams worked on several improvement streams in parallel. These included the roll-out of a new architectural vision and the transition to microservices. Developers also upgraded the core Unity system on several fronts, making it easier to manage, and slashing technical debt in the process.

The Unity environment was meanwhile migrated to the Amazon Cloud, and at the same time, cloud capacity for the different business applications were optimized according to business demands. An enhanced automation infrastructure was introduced, with a continuous delivery pipeline providing seamless updates and modern tooling that ensured Essent’s team work agile and efficient.

The consultants also helped Essent improve the way new features and updates are rolled out, among others through the roll-out of continuous delivery and test automation. The full deployment pipeline was automated, enabling quicker, higher-quality releases, aligning with the goal of accelerating time-to-market.

Finally, Essent worked with Levi9 to transition to Agile and DevOps processes, enabling the company to operate more efficiently and respond swiftly to market demands.

The results

Fast forward to today, and Essent has successfully transformed – in a radical manner – the way how its IT underpins its B2B Services business. The digital transformation enabled Essent to shift from an in-person, interactive call center to a fully digital, self-service platform that allows B2B customers to manage their energy needs independently.

By optimizing IT systems and reducing personnel costs, Essent managed to “achieve a dramatic improvement” in its financials. Notably, during the course of the digital transformation, the B2B Services business went from lossmaking to profitable.

An outline of some of the main improvements realized:

  • Improved Time-to-Market and Reduced Operational Costs: The program efforts led to an improved time-to-market and a significant reduction in operational costs, achieving the targeted 25% reduction.
  • Reduced Hosting Costs and Improved Cost Control: By migrating to the Amazon Cloud, Essent significantly cut hosting costs for Unity system environments and made it easier for the IT function to manage its operating budget.
  • Accelerated Responses: The move to a modern cloud infrastructure led to faster response times and the ability to implement infrastructure changes more swiftly.
  • Operational Agility and Flexibility: A higher degree of operational agility and flexibility enables Essent to scale cloud capacity and applications as needed to meet fluctuating business demands.
  • Automated Infrastructure and Continuous Delivery: The implementation of automated infrastructure and a continuous delivery pipeline within the cloud streamlines operations and minimizes manual intervention.
  • Innovation through Cloud Technology: By adopting cloud technology, Essent enhanced its ability to innovate and adapt to market changes quickly.
  • Higher Quality and Reliability in Production: The project resulted in higher quality and reliability in production, with reduced time-to-market for new features and updates.

Commenting on the project, the Engagement Leader at Levi9 stated: “We are proud to have contributed to this strategic program at Essent, and on the high ratings we have received from our client, underscoring the exceptional value and impact of our team’s contributions. It demonstrates out ability to surpass client expectations, foster strong collaboration, and deliver outstanding results in complex, high-stakes environments.”