Centrica uses Microsoft Fabric to expose new data insights and enable faster, more responsive reporting

Centrica is a leading UK integrated energy company. It needed to improve the data platform used by its finance teams to make reporting more responsive and efficient.

Centrica deployed Microsoft Fabric to bring disparate data sets together, eliminate silos, deal with billions of rows of data, and enable real-time reporting via a user-friendly interface.

Reporting has been streamlined. Information can be queried in real time. New opportunities for analyses have been enabled—all helping the drive to operational excellence.

As a leading UK-based integrated energy company, Centrica holds vast quantities of data, including billing and financial data, trading data, and pricing. Data was very fragmented. Reporting frequently relied on the use of spreadsheets, which the business found very limiting.

Aaron Keddie, Finance Global Chief Operating Officer at Centrica Energy UK, explains, “We have a huge amount of data at our disposal as a trading organisation. We needed to utilise technology that was able to handle that data and provide real-time insights into that data to allow our reporting, P&L, risk, and forecasting to become much more efficient.”

“Moving forward, the amount of data we have is only going to increase exponentially,” he adds. “We need tech tools at our disposal that change our ways of working from data wrangling to data analytics.”

We deployed Microsoft Fabric in order to improve our control over data, to improve our data integrity, and enable the business to lead in data and make data-informed decisions.

Aaron Keddie, Finance Global Chief Operating Officer, Centrica

Choosing Microsoft Fabric as a data platform

In order to advance the analytics and reporting possibilities for the business, Centrica looked for a suitable solution that could bring its disparate datasets together and eliminate the silos that were holding the business back.

Concurrently, Centrica’s Finance team was managing a phased migration from a legacy billing system, which required running parallel systems. To bridge this gap, the team developed a unified financial data model to consistently record transactions across different systems and scenarios

A Power BI semantic model was introduced, enabling users to self-serve information. However, as transaction volumes grew, the Finance team needed a scalable solution for billions of rows of data. Consequently, they decided to migrate the model to Microsoft Fabric.

Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end data and analytics platform designed for enterprises that require a unified solution. It encompasses data movement, processing, ingestion, transformation, real-time event routing, and report building—providing a seamlessly integrated and user-friendly platform for analytics and reporting. This makes Microsoft Fabric the perfect choice to enable Centrica to achieve its goals.

Aaron Keddie states, “We deployed Microsoft Fabric in order to improve our control over data, to improve our data integrity, and enable the business to lead in data and make data-informed decisions.”

Freeing the business from data constraints

The seamless integration with Microsoft Azure Big Data platform, Microsoft Fabric’s user-friendly interface and the close collaboration between Centrica’s IT, Finance, and Finance Data teams have facilitated an integrated, efficient, and responsive solution.

Data is collected from core systems, including ERP, billing, CRM, and industry data. A combination of HDInsight jobs and Azure Data Factory pipelines ensure an efficient and reliable data flow. Once ingested to the Lakehouse in Azure, data is subjected to multiple quality checks to ensure its integrity and reliability. Users can then interact with the data using Microsoft Fabric, which delivers sophisticated features via an interface which can be used by beginners. Using Microsoft Fabric’s Shortcuts feature, Centrica can create virtual pointers to data stored in a variety of locations. This enables seamless integration with external data sources without physically moving or copying data.

Centrica has been impressed by the ease with which the improvements could be made. Arne Richards, Finance Systems Manager at Centrica Energy UK, says, “The ability to take Microsoft Fabric and use it immediately with minimal integration has been a real gamechanger for us.”

The business is freed from reporting constraints

Anupam Gupta, Director of Trading Architecture & Data at Centrica Energy UK, describes the impact of deploying Microsoft Fabric. He says, “We suddenly could introduce millions of rows of data where users can drill down and create label data and investigate it in an auditable way.”

This is made possible by Direct Lake, a new feature in Microsoft Fabric which enables a storage mode option for tables in a Power BI semantic model to be stored in a Microsoft Fabric workspace. The new capabilities have enabled users to deliver rapid wins. For example, 45 separate report spreadsheets have been streamlined into one real-time report using Microsoft Fabric.

“Microsoft Fabric is giving us a workbench where we can bring out data together and get our datasets to users much faster,” agrees Arne Richards. “Microsoft Fabric enables us to knit together multiple data models across residential and business-to-business billing systems into a unified, single model. This is really improving efficiencies and we can get our data products to customers in record time.”

Aaron Keddie confirms, “We’ve changed our ways of working from ingesting vast quantities of CSV files into Excel to being able to query billions of rows of data within tens of seconds.”

The speed at which data can now be accessed, manipulated, and shared via reports has transformed how the Finance and Trading teams make information available to the business.

Further improvements are expected

Now that Centrica has created a modern, unified data platform that enables the business to bring disparate datasets together, it is looking forward to further innovations in analytics and reporting made possible by its Microsoft Fabric deployment.

A great example of how the business is already exploring how to extend its use of and benefits from Microsoft Fabric is a project to draw data from smart meters, which has unlocked 10 billion records. This is enabling Centrica to deep dive into how different consumer groups use energy at different times of day. These insights will inform potential new commercial offerings, aid Centrica’s understanding of its Net Zero impact, and improve the control environment.

“People are looking at more insights. People are looking at more self-serve,” says Anupam Gupta. “And that will all be possible because the focus in not on producing the reports anymore—the focus is on the data.”