Designing and Delivering Empire

In a new three-part series, we’re diving into the complete story of Empire. Part one explores the internal and external drivers that led to the creation of the award-winning trading and nomination platform, as well as the journey to design and deploy the platform in just 18 months. Part two will explore the platform’s first year in the market and part three will explore what the future holds for Empire.

“We had one central goal: to enable our customers to manage their entire BritNed trading portfolio from a single platform and work more efficiently than ever before”, explains BritNed’s Commercial Operations & Planning Manager, Nils Teipel, as he begins to reflect on the first anniversary of market-leading energy trading platform, Empire.

Twelve months on since Empire was launched following a strategic partnership between BritNed and Supercharge, the platform has allocated 6194GW of Day Ahead and Intraday capacity with a total Allocation Revenue of €13.9M, and 14191GW of Long-Term capacity with €100.9M Allocation Revenue. The total Flow instructed by Empire was 4515GWh, which is equivalent to powering approximately 1.4M households every single year. The platform has been warmly welcomed by BritNed’s customers and received industry recognition with several award nominations and wins.

But what was the driver behind the platform’s creation and Nils’ determination to deliver a product the market had never seen before?

“We’re extremely customer centric as an organisation, meaning we are always exploring new ways to innovate that ensure our customers receive a superior experience when they engage with BritNed”, Nils explains.

“Historically, we’ve been slightly restricted by the some of the industry-standard processes we needed to align with, but throughout our 13-year history, we’ve always been comfortable in exploring new directions and innovations if they are of benefit for the customer.”

In 2021, when the unexpected happened and Great Britain left the EU’s Internal Energy Market due to Brexit, BritNed was forced to drop out of the Market Coupling arrangements and market codes. Such seismic change also provided great opportunity – to break free from the fragmented processes which had facilitated cross border energy trading previously and re-imagine the trading environment with one single platform to unify and simplify the trading process. One platform to enable participation in Long-Term auctions, Day Ahead and Intraday auctions, alongside the nomination of awarded transmission rights and the management of financial settlements.

“When it was announced Great Britain was leaving the EU, we’d conducted an internal analysis and identified that the three systems our customers used weren’t quite matching the superior experience we felt our customers deserved. Things like limited flexibility, outdated software standards and a somewhat complex and fractured trading process were taking up valuable time for traders already operating in a high-pressure environment. Depending on which auctions participants were active in, they’d usually need to login to all three separate systems to complete the full trading activities. Whilst it created great unrest in the industry, we saw Brexit had provided a rare opportunity which we were keen to seize to transform the trading experience for our customers.”

Nils and his team began to scope the project, eventually inviting several expert software development companies to bid to partner with BritNed and design a brand-new platform. This process saw Supercharge join the project in March 2022.

Nils explains: “The functionality of our existing systems needed re-imagining, and we needed a project partner who also understood exactly how to place UX at the forefront of design, to help us do that.

“Supercharge are specialists in creating software that combines cutting-edge technology with a human-centred design, so our decision to choose them as our digital product development partner was based on their expertise in creating energy software and other complex solutions that resulted in tools that help maximise efficiency in the field of critical infrastructure.

“We also had a very ambitious project roadmap to deliver the platform in just 18 months, and it was clear from Supercharge’s demonstrable track record that they could run in parallel with us and help deliver Empire on schedule.”

Daniel Homoki-Farkas, Managing Director at Supercharge, explains: “Collaboration was always at the fore of the Empire design project, and we quickly got to work to progress the crucial UX element of the brief.

“We held several system design workshops where we analysed every process before optimising it and then finally designing the system workflow and interface. We brought together BritNed’s energy trading experts with our own team of process IT specialists and UX/UI designers to leverage the decades of experience across the team.”

Feedback and requests from BritNed’s customers heavily influenced the final design of Empire, Nils says.

“In parallel to our internal project workshops, we organised workshops with our customers that allowed us to gather their views on suggested improvements to the work environment and the interface designs, which we then continuously fed back to the development team.”

When workshops were complete, the outcomes from them evolved into wireframe concepts based on an ideal user experience, before being translated into an Atomic Design System to create a new, super-efficient digital work environment that was modelled on the ideal workflows of BritNed customers.

With the Empire platform almost ready, it was time to give customers the opportunity to stress-test the system prior to launch and let them begin the process of integrating Empire with their own systems.

Nils explains: “We began customer testing in July 2023. We set up multiple business scenarios to run regularly on the platform to test certain features, and we also set up scenarios based on ad-hoc customer requests. Of course, the whole test period was fully supported by the then newly established Empire Helpdesk, set up to manage the operation of Empire on 24/7 basis.”

Following a successful eight-week test period, Empire was officially launched in September 2023, just 18 months after project formally started with the onboarding of Supercharge.

“To minimise customer disruption, we decided to switch over to Empire during a planned one-week BritNed interconnector maintenance period”, Nils explains.

“The BritNed and Supercharge teams spent that full week working together going through hundreds of checklist items, monitoring functions, and checking first process runs of the system. It was a huge team effort. If any minor issues were identified, developers were immediately available to rectify them.

“This led to an extremely smooth go-live, and we were fully operational on Empire as soon as the BritNed interconnector became re-available for commercial use, without any operational or market disturbances.”

So, does Nils feel that he and BritNed achieved their goals for Empire as the platform marks 12 months of use in the market?

“I most definitely do”, he says. “We have received excellent feedback thus far, and Empire continues to develop and improve. Customers are informing us that Empire is providing them with greater convenience and control over their trading activity, which was one of the key goals of bringing Empire to the market.

“We have already made several improvements to the new platform – all guided by our customers, and Empire has since facilitated the launch of subsequent industry-first auction types that have revolutionised trading–including Buy Now Auctions, which uses a Dutch mechanism to provide participants with the ability to trade closer to the delivery period, and Weekly Auctions, which made BritNed the first UK interconnector to introduce a permanent Weekly Auction.

“These subsequent products, that continue to make life easier every day for our customers by placing their experience at the core, would not have been possible without Empire there to facilitate their delivery – and of that, I and the project teams are extremely proud.”

In part two of this series, Nils will discuss the shift in the team’s focus from new product development to existing product improvement, which has seen Empire progress from V1.0 to V4.0 in just 12 months, the launch of two industry-first auction products, and much more.