Gorilla spoke with Ray Magill, New Propositions Manager at Scottish Power. Download the success story here

The Company

ScottishPower is a UK energy supplier headquartered in Glasgow, Scotland. It operates across Scotland, the north of England, and North Wales, providing services in energy generation, distribution, transmission, and retail. It generates 100% of its electricity from wind offering customers 100% renewable tariffs in their commitment to net zero emissions.

The Challenge

The company needed a better way to calculate tariff valuations for domestic and SME customers, to ensure it covered costs and delivered enough margin. 

“It’s important to be agile to the market so that we are ahead of our competitors, able to meet sales targets, and that we’re able to react quicker to changes in the energy market. There have been a lot of changes over the last couple of years and we’ve needed to react quicker to what customers want.”

Ray Magill, New Propositions Manager for ScottishPower

The pricing team realised they needed a change during a valuation period when they were looking to really ramp up their tariff offerings, as resources were highly stretched. At the same time, the team was aiming to future-proof their capabilities. They needed a solution that could bring them greater agility, without sacrificing control over their robust valuation processes. Any new software would need to be highly customisable to give ScottishPower the control and capabilities it needed.

“The main requirements were efficiency in time and resources, the ability to be more flexible and agile in our tariff launches, and specifically we were looking for software that was adaptable and customisable for what we wanted to do.”

Gorilla’s Solution

“The main reasons we chose Gorilla to partner with was first user friendliness, it looked really easy to use and train the team on. In terms of speed, the calculations and valuations were run at incredible speed, which was far greater than previously. Also, in terms of customisation, from the beginning it was clear that you could customise it the way we wanted to.”

ScottishPower surveyed several options but were immediately attracted to Gorilla thanks to the ease of use, speed and customisation options. Right from the start, the team were impressed by the effort Gorilla put into demos, showing a proof of concept that could do everything ScottishPower was looking for in terms of processes and flexibility. The ability to replicate business-as-usual got immediate buy-in from the wider company.

“In terms of internal buy-in, our valuation process is an extremely important part of business operations, and we needed to ensure we could migrate that process with 100% reliability.”

Since the rollout of Gorilla, the team have moved more and more processes into the platform, sunsetting their reliance on spreadsheets and delivering greater efficiencies. Gorilla is able to handle greater volumes of data and deliver more interesting outputs.

Before the project started, launching tariffs was a very manual process, but now it's almost completely automated through Gorilla, and a lot quicker in time to market. Customised outputs feed directly into the billing system, saving further time not just for the pricing team but other teams across the company.

The Future

“One of the biggest gains for me personally is looking at an old existing process, and exploring ways of making it a lot better by using a modern and innovative IT system. It’s been a huge gain for me, to take any existing process and transform it into something automated and modern.”

Looking forward, Ray wants to embed Gorilla further into the company, not just in their team but other teams as well, getting everyone more involved and familiar with Gorilla. They can provide a lot more insight and analysis that they couldn’t do before, helping other partners in the business to gain more insight into tariffs and pricing.

Both Gorilla and ScottishPower are excited to continue this partnership and see where it goes as the industry grows and evolves. In particular, Gorilla’s plans around MHHS are really interesting to Scottish Power, with all the data that will bring and the platform’s power they are in a great position to make use of it and unlock even more value.