Enel

Victor Prieto, Head of Network Delivery at Enel Group, is responsible for a global unit that delivers infrastructure and telecommunication services for IT and OT activities. Victor discusses how collaboration with the Cisco CX Cloud team helped provide better insight into supply chain and infrastructure, improving performance and reliability of operations.

Enel is one of the world’s leading integrated energy providers. My team directly supports Enel’s strategic initiatives that rely on our telecommunications network. We are responsible for delivering infrastructure and telecommunication services to support Enel’s employees and business lines, including energy generation and distribution.

As a global company, we provide energy to countries in Europe, South and North America. Sustainability is a key component of our approach at Enel. I am proud to lead a team that supports the renewable energy transition not only for our customers, but also the countries they operate in.

As an integrated operator, we are involved in the entire value chain of the business. As such, we are focused on continuous growth and digital transformation to create more efficiencies across our business and supply chain. This goes hand in hand with our values of sustainability and renewable resources, which includes one of our largest priorities, the digitization of the electrical grid.

Cisco is a key strategic partner in this journey. With such a large, global infrastructure, digitizing our electrical grids requires high focus and cooperation.

Acquiring real-time insights for better decisions

Cisco has supplied thousands of routers and switches for our grid and power plants. We are continuously evolving our network to achieve our goals, and to accomplish this, we need the right information to make the right decisions at the right time. We were able to find this essential visibility with Cisco CX Cloud, the digital interface for Cisco Success Tracks.

CX Cloud provides us with a unified view of our entire Cisco portfolio, including access to insights and analytics. This helps us make informed decisions about our network, saving us time so we can focus on more strategic initiatives.

With our involvement in the supply chain from beginning to end, we knew that extra visibility into the lifecycle of our devices was paramount to our success. Although CX Cloud provided us with a wealth of information, we realized an opportunity to improve our experience with additional insights that would fit our business needs.

Through the CX Cloud Beta Program, we submitted this feedback directly to the Cisco team. This is a collaborative program that allows customers to contribute to the development of new capabilities within CX Cloud.

Through this program, we partnered with the Cisco team to enhance the functionality to provide us with the visibility we needed. The result was a new CX Cloud prototype that allows us to track orders, assets and details from an end-to-end perspective, without wasting valuable time searching for information. Now, we can quickly determine where our devices are located throughout the lifecycle—from the initial purchase order, to delivery, deployment and beyond.

With this added functionality, we can now better manage our delivery projects and the expectations of our internal customers, as well as adjust our plans to better achieve our goals. This information is in CX Cloud, accessible by all members of my team worldwide, available on a 24x7 basis.

Dynamic collaboration to achieve success

Together, we developed an ad hoc solution with Cisco that can be leveraged by other customers—collaboration at its best. The prototype development process was based on Agile methodology, with a regular cadence of interaction between the Cisco and Enel teams. As part of this process, I invited members of my team from different countries to use the prototype and collected their feedback to share.

The Cisco CX Cloud team listened carefully to the feedback we provided to fully understand our needs. They helped identify our main goals and developed a basic solution that we continued to refine and iterate together to develop a final, production-ready product. The process was dynamic, effective, and productive because of the engagement and effort from both of our teams.

Driving powerful outcomes with comprehensive visibility

Gaining visibility into our supply chain has enabled us to accelerate project delivery, enhance risk management, and effectively plan workarounds in case issues arise. We know what to expect in terms of our device lifecycles.

Additionally, our CX Cloud prototype is improving the satisfaction of our internal customers and is improving our business. Now, we have more information about our supply chain, giving us the ability to reskill, reprioritize our activities, and manage the expectations of our business. Because of this, we now have more time to focus on how we can continue innovating to deliver great results for our customers.

Meeting future challenges

With our Cisco CX Cloud solution in place, Enel is well-positioned to meet today’s unique supply chain challenges. We are confident that this solution will help not only Enel, but other companies seeking to improve their efficiency and business agility.

The needs of our consumers and of society are always evolving, and we will be ready to support them—I’m looking forward to that challenge. We hope to continue contributing to the infrastructure and services of telecommunications for renewable energies, to continue contributing to making the world a better, more sustainable place.