COODE for increased efficiency: Uniper turns employee ideas into solutions with Azure

The challenge: Making critical operating know-how readily accessible on site 

All the major players on the energy market, Uniper included, have a common challenge: to ensure a reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy supply. To this end, Uniper strives to operate all physical assets, such as large power plants or gas storage facilities as optimally as possible to provide customers with reliable, flexible, and steadily greener energy supply while maximizing the assets’ entire life cycle value. The key factor to enabling value across this diverse portfolio is digitalization: Planning, building, commissioning, and operating energy assets is a large investment. To make the right decisions for physical assets, it’s important to know how each component works, how it’s designed and built, what maintenance cycles are required, etc. And therein lies the difficulty, because no two energy projects are alike. Each is unique in its location, purpose, and organization. The corporate knowledge necessary to optimize the operation of all these individual facilities exists, but typically it’s siloed in different systems that in the past have not been able to talk to each other. Or they are kept in a secure location, for example in fire proof steel rooms at the plant – because not anybody should be able to access such vital information. Those circumstances made optimization difficult, slow, and complicated.

“Our people know the power plants and their specific challenges best. So, we wanted to use their ideas and their operational and IT expertise to further digitalize our plants,” says Dr. Peter Struckmann. He heads the Chief Operating Officer’s Digital Evolution (COODE) organization with the aim of accelerating Unipers energy transition. “We encourage our people to spend their time thinking about how to optimize their business and way of working, not searching for the right information.” To support this, COODE decided to use Microsoft Azure to create standardized modular digital and AI services—which are helping to turn employee ideas into business transforming digital solutions.

The solution: Use Microsoft Azure to turn ideas into interconnected solutions 

At its core, COODE is an organization established in the COO area that connects operational, commercial, and project development teams with digital technology leaders. “We bring the COO people who drive the business together with technology experts who have a deep understanding of technology like cloud and AI. The place where they meet is Azure,” Struckmann explains. Operational employees can enter their ideas for digitalizing every aspect of their business in an idea tracker. The COODE organization then aligns these ideas with business strategy. If an idea meets the necessary criteria, it is sent to the software engineering teams. There, developers create a solution on the COODE platform.

“Microsoft gave us a technology stack that allows us to create innovative solutions for every aspect of our business,” Struckmann says. “Our modular concept, which makes everything a service, lets us focus on business logic. With Azure, we have the latest developments, including GenAI, at our fingertips, driving transformative changes and enables us to accelerate the energy transition.”

Using Azure to optimize operations at any plant 

The first Generative AI use case COODE realized was for Uniper’s Scholven power plant in Gelsenkirchen. The site team had thousands of operational documents for running a new facility: a total of 162,000 files. Those files are kept in a secure, fire proof steel room. Finding the classified information, they needed to operate and maintain the new facility took a great deal of time. Because COODE had a framework ready to provide a solution, they could extract the information they needed from the operational and training manuals and securely store it in Azure Blob Storage. There, they connected it to Azure OpenAI Services to add skillsets and enable indexing of the documents. “We then used ChatGPT large language models to generate factual answers for the operational teams about the manuals,” says Arian Van Ledden, Data and AI Lead at Uniper. By deploying the chat agent with Azure App Service, colleagues at the Scholven power station—regardless of the language they speak—can access the classified know-how and find the answer they need to solve issues on site. This dramatically shortens the time it takes to make a decision, reduces plant downtime, and ultimately lowers the total cost of ownership. The chat agent at Scholven only uses exact references from each manual in the steel room—this prevents AI hallucinations and gives colleagues total confidence in the technology.

COODE’s success: From a program to a permanent organization

Not only has COODE made the development of digital  use cases faster, they made the whole process much more cost effective. And ultimately, COODE has delivered on its central value promise: “Our goal has always been , for every euro we invest in COODE, we get four euros back. And we have kept that promise,” Struckmann says. And with COODE growing as more ideas and data are connected, the possibilities seem endless: “The more data we can use within the COODE platform, the more opportunities we can create to increase our reliability, reduce our risk, make better use of our money, and maximize the lifetime value of our portfolio,” Struckmann concludes. Arian Van Ledden adds: “We have industrialized how we manage cloud native solutions including AI – and it progresses constantly as COODE works together with Microsoft, keeping us at the cutting edge of technology,”

After four and a half years, Uniper has 295 use cases in use across the COO area, with a growing percentage now AI enabled. The story of COODE continues to evolve as every month, approximately 20 new ideas from colleagues are assessed for turning into more valuable solutions.