Cadent increases energy system collaboration and efficiency with Huwise data marketplace

As part of the drive to decarbonise energy, Cadent is focused on increasing collaboration with stakeholders, such as local authorities. The company must also meet requirements from regulator Ofgem around data sharing, while focusing on increasing internal operational efficiency and supporting a resilient, agile and data-driven business.

As an organisation, Cadent understands the importance of increasing data sharing to deliver on its objectives and deepen collaboration with stakeholders. In response, it launched a dedicated public data marketplace to provide self-service access to its data, covering areas such as pipeline assets.

Built on Huwise’s data marketplace technology, the new self-service portal went live in just three months, using the platform’s built-in development tools. Since then, Cadent  has continued to evolve the platform’s look and feel in partnership with Huwise to improve ease of use and more closely align with corporate branding.

It now contains an expanding range of data, covering gas pipeline infrastructure and other assets, along with gas usage insights and other useful information. Data is uploaded in one common file format and is then automatically available in others. This output flexibility conveniently meets the requirements both of the regulator and Cadent’s customers. 

Seamlessly connecting local authorities to relevant data 

Local authorities are a key stakeholder for Cadent. They need to understand more about the gas network’s activity to develop important Local Area Energy Plans (LAEPs), as well as to collaborate with Cadent teams for planning and contingency requirements. To make access simple and straightforward, Cadent provides open pipeline geospatial data split by local authority, delivering instant access that is easily understandable without requiring technical skills.  Information is visualised on drill-down maps, can be downloaded in common file formats or connected to via API.

Clear processes to structure the data journey

The marketplace is designed to streamline how stakeholders are able to discover and access data. They can search for and view any of approximately 200 published open datasets through self-service, without needing to make contact. The Dublin Core-compliant metadata provides more technical users with different ways to discover relevant data. Data can be published at different levels of openness in a single place, with stakeholders able to see if a more detailed version of the dataset exists and explore its metadata. They can request this from the dataset page. This ‘all-in-one data marketplace’ ensures compliance and streamlines customer requests.

Supporting business needs

Showing its ease of deployment, the marketplace went live in just three months. Moving forward, the data team has been collaborating with experts within Cadent to identify commonly requested data assets and develop them together to ensure that the output is relevant, well described and accurate. To achieve buy-in, the data team can quickly create and prototype how data assets will appear. Being able to demonstrate it gets stakeholders engaged, helping improve outputs and the range of available data.

Demand data to help with planning

As well as sharing the location of Cadent’s network assets, the company is introducing a growing range of demand data to the marketplace. This enables stakeholders to see how gas demand fluctuates over time and to assess a region’s consumption of gas, helping with a stakeholder’s strategic planning.  

Box out: Close partnership to deliver success

Cadent has a small team of two on the marketplace, which means the support that Huwise provides has been central to success. Huwise’s experience with the regulated energy sector means it has developed a product which really helps Cadent to achieve compliance, providing access to a wide range of skills that the team can easily tap into, saving the time and expense of finding or training people internally. This maximises resources and has enabled Cadent to develop the marketplace and the data on it at pace.

Cadent’s successful data sharing strategy relies on three key capabilities of the Huwise solution:

Connectors to deliver end-to-end automation

Cadent’s data assets are developed in a centralised analytical system and then published to the Huwise platform through a specific, certified connector. That provides an automated, secure, end-to-end data flow, with data transformed, staged and prepared in the analytical system as well as enabling high-frequency updates. Built-in scheduling gives flexibility to either update data automatically, or to control flows in case of back-end issues for added resilience.

Feedback through built-in forms

Cadent is now looking to roll-out Huwise’s built-in forms capability in order to capture feedback from users. This is a fully-customisable, mobile-friendly and flexible solution that further streamlines collaboration and makes it easy for users to rate their experience of the marketplace. This data can be used to improve how the team operates, ensuring Cadent is meeting stakeholder needs.  

Ability to share data via different licences

To access any data on the platform, users need to be registered and logged in. To deepen security, Huwise allows Cadent to provide data under multiple licences, depending on its commercial sensitivity. Users can request and be granted access to data under secure agreement licenses or even consume restricted datasets through granular access rights. This flexibility supports in managing the different needs of stakeholders, while maximising data protection.

Cadent’s public data marketplace is now central to its data sharing strategy, with the utility business seeing a wide range of benefits including:

Greater engagement and understanding of stakeholders

Cadent has a wide range of stakeholders across the country, and previously it has been difficult to understand their individual data needs. Now, the company can track real-time behaviour on the marketplace, the assets accessed, and frequency of use. Combined with internal feedback and the new form feature, this guides how the marketplace will be expanded, and the type of data added moving forward. As well as local authorities, data is being used by a wider audience including researchers and engineers.

Driving efficiency and saving time

Previously all requests for data were handled manually by the Open Data team. Now, much of the data required to answer stakeholders is available on the marketplace through self-service. People can now look, explore, and then ask more targeted questions later in the process. Before the marketplace, Cadent received an average of ten data sharing requests every month, which took up between 50-75% of the team’s time. During the last calendar year, Cadent experienced around 6,000 full or partial downloads – to effectively manage that volume without self-service would require a team of 20 people.

Enabling a collaborative, decarbonised future

Not only does the marketplace underpin compliance with Ofgem’s Data Best Practice requirements, it provides a platform for the future. Cadent is now able to work closely with other gas networks to develop common standards for data output through the platform, helping to meet forthcoming energy sector developments such as the Energy Sector Digitalisation Plan.