Insights
Kraken has become one of the most talked about platforms in the utilities world, and for good reason. It now serves tens of millions of customer accounts across energy and, increasingly, water. If your business is weighing up a move onto Kraken, this guide explains what the platform is, which utilities already use it, and what a migration onto it actually involves.
By Christopher Fagan
Kraken is the customer and operations platform built inside Octopus Energy Group and now run as a separate technology business. It combines billing, customer service, metering, data and automation in one system, with a heavy emphasis on artificial intelligence to keep the cost to serve low.
The platform is licensed to utilities around the world. Publicly announced users include Octopus Energy itself, E.ON Next and Good Energy in the UK, EDF, Tokyo Gas in Japan and Origin Energy in Australia. On the water side, Leep Utilities became the first water utility to migrate onto Kraken, and Portsmouth Water followed by moving hundreds of thousands of customers across. Between them these licensees account for tens of millions of contracted accounts.
The pull is usually a mix of three things. The first is cost to serve, since the automation inside Kraken removes a large share of manual work in billing and service. The second is customer experience, because a single joined up view of the customer allows faster and more accurate contact. The third is future readiness, as the platform is designed for smart metering, flexible tariffs and the half hourly settlement world that the market is moving towards.
A migration is far more than a software install. In practice the work falls into several streams that have to move together.
We led the first ever water migration onto Kraken, which meant solving problems that had no precedent on the platform. Water brings its own billing rules, its own industry data flows and its own regulatory expectations, none of which the platform had handled before. The lesson that carried through was that early, honest data profiling is the single biggest predictor of a clean cutover. Programmes that treat data as a late stage task almost always pay for it at go live. Programmes that treat it as the first priority give themselves room to fix problems before they become billing errors in front of real customers.
Start with data, design the operating model in parallel with the build rather than after it, and rehearse the cutover until it is boring. Above all, keep a small number of people who understand both the old world and the new one, because they are the ones who catch the issues that neither the platform team nor the legacy team can see on their own.
PEF has hands on experience delivering platform migrations in the utilities sector, including on Kraken. If you are planning a move, our energy and utilities team and our delivery excellence practice can help you scope it properly. Talk to us about where you are in your planning.
Kraken is the customer and operations platform built inside Octopus Energy Group and now run as a separate technology business. It combines billing, customer service, metering, data and automation in one system, with heavy use of artificial intelligence to keep the cost to serve low.
Publicly announced users include Octopus Energy, E.ON Next and Good Energy in the UK, EDF, Tokyo Gas in Japan and Origin Energy in Australia. On the water side, Leep Utilities was the first water utility to migrate onto Kraken and Portsmouth Water followed.
It varies with the size and complexity of the book, but a migration is a full programme covering data, operating model, integration and cutover rather than a simple software install. The single biggest predictor of a clean go live is early and honest data profiling.
If any of this is live for you right now, the senior people who wrote it are the people you would work with.