Uniper Builds a Data-First Business Strategy for Improved Decision-Making and AI Innovation

With a central data platform built on Snowflake, Uniper has migrated several key data sets to the cloud. The company’s most recent and ambitious undertaking has been to migrate its business-critical reporting platform, containing a huge amount of data for reporting, risk management, trading, prices, optimizations and business logic. 

“We had a decade-old reporting platform which had served us really well, but it needed a revamp,” says Oliver Hinz, Project Manager and Scrum Master at Uniper. “We were fighting for every gigabyte of space, and it became a challenge to keep the lights on and resolve issues. That ate up lots of capacity we could have been using to develop our business.”

The migration to Snowflake took just a little over a year, and has resulted in lower costs and greater speed to insight. But perhaps the biggest benefit has been to productivity. 

“Before, we had servers and databases that took days to scale up,” says Ayyagari. “Someone would have to organize adding a disk in one of our data centers. With Snowflake, it all happens in a single click, which means we can start working with data straight away.”

This speed has made a tangible difference to the daily activities of the company’s data teams, and the decision-makers who rely on that data, helping them to keep stride with market fluctuations as they happen. As Ayyagari explains, “No one buys the paper to read yesterday’s news.” Today, the business gets the headlines as they happen. 

“Our teams previously had long waiting times for key data reports to be complete. Now we’ve gained a significant improvement in productivity,” Ayyagari says. “Key information is already available at the start of the business hours, so we can make fast and more informed decisions. They’re also having a great time working on the new platform and having the opportunity to innovate further.”

In addition, there’s also been a noticeable improvement in resilience. With the old infrastructure, the management of such a large volume of data very often slowed the whole system down. With Snowflake’s scalable architecture, Uniper can easily handle the huge amounts of trading information needed to make the best business decisions.

“Ultimately we’ve benefited through total cost of ownership, higher business engagement and by creating a foundation for AI, advanced analytics and a strong data-driven culture,” says Ayyagari. 

This strong foundation is an important step in Uniper’s growing focus on data and AI. It enables the company to make greater use of its data and explore innovation through artificial intelligence and machine learning. With Snowflake, Uniper now uses CoCo and Snowflake CoWork to drive new efficiencies across its power plants and analytics use cases.

Recently, the company built several agents to optimize operations at a UK power plant. These agents combine data about safety instructions, security concerns, failure incidents, market prices and maintenance schedules to identify the optimal times to conduct maintenance activities and suggest operational changes.

“The AI agents have helped our colleagues gain reliable information and instructions for critical operational tasks” says Ayyagari. “It saves countless hours that would have been spent parsing that information manually.” 

Uniper’s users don’t only rely on CoCo to retrieve insights from huge amounts of structured and unstructured data. They also use it to investigate non-performant queries. With CoCo, the AI suggests fixes to the relevant SQL statements, which business users can do themselves, fostering a more self-service data culture throughout the organization. 

Over several years working with Snowflake, Uniper has laid the foundations for a data-first approach to business, and the results have been transformative. With a single version of truth, easily accessible to those who need it, and centralized governance, employees across the organization now seamlessly connect to the same information. The result is faster, truly data-driven decision-making that enables Uniper to better navigate market volatility and serve communities.

“Our colleagues can do more than they did in the past, because performance is so much better,” says Ayyagari. “We’re ready for growth, and we can now do AI at scale with CoCo, because we have the centralized, clean and governed data to do it reliably.” 

Going forward, Uniper plans to use its huge amounts of historic and current data to do more predictive analysis of the energy market, helping the company stay one step ahead of change. And it will continue to implement GenAI use cases and uncover new efficiencies across the organization. 

All of this comes back to the three pillars that help Uniper to serve communities and businesses, keep the world powered, and steer the transition to a cleaner energy ecosystem.

“Our three pillars are security, resilience, and data and AI,” says Ayyagari. “Snowflake supports all three. We have a secure and resilient data ecosystem, catering to our ever-growing data volume — and a platform to fuel a future of cutting-edge technologies and AI capabilities.”