Energy and Utilities
The Kraken platform, built by Octopus Energy Group and licensed through Kraken Technologies, has become the platform much of the energy retail market is moving onto. EDF has agreed to move around five million customers across, Shell and E.ON Next have migrated, and suppliers internationally are.
PEF Consulting Partners led the first ever migration of a water utility onto the Kraken platform and supported E.ON Next through its Kraken transformation. For the full client side service, see Kraken migration consulting or take the free migration readiness check.
Moving a customer book onto Kraken is not a routine system change. It carries the same characteristics as the hardest programmes in the sector: live customer and revenue data that has to migrate cleanly, a cutover that affects service and billing the moment it happens, deep integration with metering and market systems, and a timetable driven by commercial commitments. The suppliers who migrate well treat it with the discipline that risk demands. Those who underestimate it discover the cost in billing errors and customer disruption, in public.
Running or strengthening the migration programme: the plan, the governance, the integration and the cutover strategy, with the risks that actually decide the outcome managed from the start rather than discovered late.
The heart of a Kraken migration and the largest source of risk. Migrating live customer, billing and meter data accurately, with the business owning the data, full volume trial migrations, and reconciliation agreed early rather than negotiated at cutover. See what goes wrong with data migration.
Rehearsing the cutover for real, more than once, including a tested fallback, so the live event is a proven repeat rather than a first attempt, because a bad cutover shows up immediately in customers’ bills.
An unconflicted view for your board on whether the migration is genuinely ready to go live, particularly valuable when the delivery involves the platform provider and other parties. See independent programme assurance.
Migration is only part of what we do on Kraken. Our work comes in two parts.
We sit on your side of the table while the vendor and your integrator deliver: we test readiness and the plan, assure each stage gate and the go live decision, and check that data and billing reconcile.
Or we run it end to end: we lead the programme and integrate Kraken with the systems around it, from meter data and payments to finance and CRM, then take the migration, testing, cutover and hypercare through to a stable service.
Assurance is a low risk way to start. If you then want us to take on the integration, the team that assured the work is the team that delivers it.
We are not new to Kraken. Across energy, water and telecoms our consultants have led and recovered some of the largest migrations onto the platform, worth more than £249 million in total. We can bring a bench of five Kraken practitioners to a programme, senior people who have done this before, with international support including in Australia. For the full client side service, see our Kraken migration consulting.
We led the first ever migration of a water utility onto Kraken, with no playbook to follow. We joined a programme that was twelve months behind with not one customer migrated, reasserted client side control, and held the line until customers were moving safely.
For a major energy supplier we root caused and recovered a billing imbalance of more than £160 million that had emerged after a Kraken migration. We traced it to the underlying configuration and corrected it before it became a regulatory or shareholder problem.
For a UK utility we ran the discovery, negotiated the commercial terms and the right protections, built the plan, the target operating model and the delivery team, held overall assurance, and delivered 65 days ahead of plan and to budget.
As Kraken has moved into broadband and telecoms, we have delivered a major telecoms operator onto the platform. Our experience now spans energy retail, water and telecoms, not a single market.
Kraken now runs across energy, water and telecoms. See our dedicated pages for water and telecoms and broadband, or the full worldwide Kraken service.
A Kraken migration typically involves the platform provider and often a large integrator. That is exactly the situation where a supplier benefits from an independent adviser working for them alone: someone to hold the plan honest, challenge optimism, and give the board a view uncoloured by the commercial relationships in the room. We do not licence the platform or take commission from its vendor, which is what keeps our advice yours.
Most Kraken programmes meet the same handful of problems. None of them is a surprise if you have done this before, and every one is cheaper to prevent than to recover.
The most expensive mistake we see. Get the billing and data configuration wrong and the errors show up straight away in customers’ bills and in the cash the business collects. We design and test this before go live, not after.
Customer, billing and meter data has to migrate cleanly and reconcile to numbers the business has agreed in advance. We insist on full volume trial migrations and a reconciliation everyone has signed up to, so there are no surprises on the live run. See what goes wrong with data migration.
A Kraken cutover should be a proven repeat, not a first attempt. We rehearse it for real more than once, with a tested fallback, because a cutover that fails is visible to every customer within a billing cycle.
A migration usually involves the platform provider and a large integrator, each with their own interests. Without an adviser working for you alone, the supplier carries risks that were never theirs. See our independent programme assurance.
No. We are independent and work for the supplier, which is the whole point. Our interest is your migration landing well, not the platform relationship.
Yes. We can come in to assure, stabilise or recover a migration already underway. See programme recovery.
All three. We led the first water utility onto Kraken, we work across energy retail, and as Kraken has moved into broadband and telecoms we have delivered a major telecoms operator onto the platform. The discipline is the same wherever the platform goes.
It depends on the size and state of your customer book and data, but these are programmes measured in many months, not weeks. The work that decides the timeline is usually the data and the number of trial migrations, which is why we start there.
Yes. We often sit alongside the platform provider and a large integrator, working for you alone and holding the whole thing to account. You can use us for assurance over others, or to run the programme yourselves with us leading it.
Yes. We can run the discovery, test your readiness and negotiate the commercial terms and protections, so you go in with your eyes open. A good place to start is our migration readiness check.
From challenger suppliers to the largest books in the market. The risks are the same at any scale. What changes with size is how much rehearsal and reconciliation the book demands.
It works for the energy supplier rather than the platform. Ours does two things: Part A assures your migration plan, data and readiness; Part B delivers the full integration alongside your teams and Kraken’s, so someone on your side owns the outcome.
Our consultants have worked across energy retail and the systems it runs on. If you are still getting to grips with the platform itself, start with our guide to Kraken Technologies, and for the basics of supplier billing, energy billing explained. See energy and utilities or get in touch.
We bring senior people who have delivered exactly this at scale. Honest advice, and accountability for the outcome.