Kinnect Insights Solution project
The Insights Solution is a cloud based data platform. It builds on the current industry-renowned BMRS platform and will provide a richer, more up to date and detailed data service.
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How it relates to you
Our vision is to build on Elexon’s data capabilities so that the Insight Solution becomes the ‘go’ to platform for the GB energy industry. Our new Insights Solution will use cloud-based services to receive, process and publish data for the benefit of our customer, stakeholder and the industry.
- Customer Solution service – providing an intuitive customer experience
- Settlement Solution project – performing scalable, flexible and modular Settlement operations
Project timeline
Benefits
The Insights Solution will re-architect the existing BMRS to take advantage of the data platform that underpins the Settlement and Customer Solutions and it will enhance our understanding of data by bringing together data that is currently siloed in the monolithic Agent applications.
By using cloud infrastructure, it will mean an improvement in operational performance, less unplanned outages and a reduction in maintenance; ultimately enabling faster change for BMRS industry data.
Through an improved customer digital interface and experience, the Insights Solution will mean customers and stakeholders can do their own ad hoc analysis of data using on-demand services to provide them with invaluable insights of their own data and that of the industry. We will also improve data visualisation on the platform by integrating Power BI.
By incorporating all of the recommendations from the Energy Data Taskforce, it will support our open data philosophy and remove the silos of data, allowing the industry to gain valuable understanding of the enhanced analytics and insight.
We will also be looking to digitalise our guidance on BMRS data and how to access API.
The Insights Solution will build on the current industry-renowned BMRS platform, by providing a richer, more up to date and detailed data service. Access to data will play an essential role in the industry as it will help our customers develop new products and services more quickly.
We are committed to open data principles across the BSC and the new Insights Solution will provide a vital, free information service to the industry.
Background to the project objectives
Our Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service (BMRS) serves to provide industry parties with operational data relating to the GB Electricity Balancing and Settlement arrangements. BMRS is used extensively by market participants to help make trading decisions and understanding market dynamics, acting as a prompt reporting platform as well as a means of accessing historic data.
Elexon introduced API data access in 2015 to access data from BMRS. The success of the BMRS API became evident through the continual growth in usage (around 3 million daily requests) as well as increasingly championed by the industry to provide wider data to the market.
However it is now becoming increasingly difficult to, at pace, to fulfil requests from customers for new data or functionality, as well as it sometimes being difficult for our customers to interpret the data. We are also now seeing that:
- it is difficult to make changes to the BMRS software platform, which mean increasingly higher maintenance, licensing and support costs
- it is more costly and time consuming to make changes to the existing platform or to deliver new services
- there is a decline in operational performance and an increase in the amount of time it takes to fix the BMRS if there is an unplanned outage or problem.
About the Kinnect platform
Elexon Kinnect is a digital customer-centric platform delivering a smart and flexible central solution for the industry, which will be delivered through a number of releases over the next few years.
The modular technology it uses will enable us to implement BSC rule changes more quickly, and provide speedier support for innovation by existing companies and new entrants.
Elexon Kinnect is made up of three elements:
Elexon Kinnect is a key pillar of our corporate strategy. It will enable us to achieve our vision of creating the leading provider of essential market services to the GB energy sector, for the benefit of market participants and their customers while serving at the heart of the energy industry, building a path to net zero.
By having a strong, scalable digital platform will support industry innovation, allow faster delivery of change, reduce the need for manual processes, which will ultimately mean we can support the industry in the future as move at pace to achieve the demands for Net Zero.
Ultimately, deploying Kinnect will result in a much better user experience and better value for money on BSC services, for all of our customers and stakeholders.