Repower accelerates innovation at its e-mobility brand, PLUG’N ROLL, with Dynamics 365, saving time and costs.

Repower, a 120-year-old Swiss electric utility business, has always prized a flexible, entrepreneurial approach. “You can think of Repower as a little bit of a venture capitalist in-house,” says Zoltan Ivan Szalai, Solution Architect and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Application Lead E-Mobility at Repower. “The business is known for financing internal startups.” One of these startups, PLUG’N ROLL, was designed to tap into the fast-growing market for e-mobility in Switzerland. When it came time for the fledgling business to select an enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) solution, Microsoft Dynamics 365 stood out against competitors as a great fit for an agile startup business. “Ours is a lean and efficient organization,” says Szalai. “We needed the right technology to support that. Dynamics 365 was cost-effective and allowed us to do things on the fly;” perfect for the accelerated pace of the bourgeoning e-mobility industry. In less than a decade, PLUG’N ROLL has grown from offering a few regional chargers to a nationwide network, providing access to a Europe-wide roaming network with 250.000 charging stations. “It is safe to say that we wouldn’t have been able to do the things we’ve done on the Dynamics platform with a different solution,” adds Szalai. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance provides a solution for a complex billing structure

PLUG’N ROLL has a complex, geographically dispersed network of charging stations and an equally challenging billing structure. Plus, all the usage data arrives from multiple data streams. “There are two main customer types we engage with,” explains Szalai. “Owners of large electric vehicle fleets and the entities who own the charging infrastructure.” While PLUG’N ROLL uses a revenue-sharing model with the charging station owners, billing looks very different for the fleet owners who are also PLUG’N ROLL customers. “The core of our Dynamics 365 solution is the thousands of invoices which are generated at the end of the billing cycle with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance,” he says. Dynamics 365 Finance proved adaptable to PLUG’N ROLL’s complex billing process. “The simplicity of the customization and development process and the cloud-based nature of the solution are a good fit for our business needs.” That simplicity epitomizes the major efficiency boost experienced by businesses that use Dynamics 365 Finance. A recent report by Forrester Consulting found that streamlining financial processes with Dynamics 365 Finance helped companies improve productivity among finance and accounting professionals by up to 55%, representing $2.30 million in savings over a three-year period. 

PLUG’N ROLL found success with Dynamics 365 in just three months, an accelerated time to value that suited the brand’s ethos. “For a business like ours, you don’t want to spend years implementing something, you need a solution that is working in a matter of months,” says Szalai. “With a startup, you need to develop your market, and you often don’t have much money to invest.” 

Taking a platform approach reduces costs, helps adapt to customer needs

PLUG’N ROLL also turned to Dynamics 365 for its sales and marketing employees, using Dynamics 365 Sales. “We have now implemented sales processes for the various customer types where our sales representatives are guided through the process, from leads to opportunities to the contract closing,” says Szalai. “At that point, the contracts become orders in our ERP system.” The benefit of a closely interoperable platform approach was clear to Szalai from the start. “When you are a startup, you can’t afford to have a dozen expensive solutions designed for specific things,” he says. “Dynamics 365 is a solution that can be made to work in various ways, even outside the narrow scope of an ERP system, which is more cost-effective overall.” 

PLUG’N ROLL also uses the highly adaptable nature of the platform to address customer needs and tailor services to specific requests, building brand loyalty and providing personalized experiences. “With a flexible solution like Dynamics 365, we find we can say yes to customers more than we say no,” says Szalai. “Some of our customers are large organizations with unique and complex processes, and we can cater to these processes without creating huge problems for ourselves down the line.” In one such case, PLUG’N ROLL is working with customers who need to manage fleet access to charging stations at any given time and adjust the cost. “We have created a portal that caters to this use case,” says Szalai. “Today, we use Dynamics 365 to ensure that the invoices are distributed to the appropriate parties at the proper cost and that the fleet managers have access to all this information via the portal.” In another instance, PLUG’N ROLL uses Dynamics 365 to help distribute invoices among a complex network of departments, categories, and individual users at a single company, mapping charging events against electricity invoices to distribute billing accurately. “This system is very flexible and allows us to facilitate such a complex structure,” says Szalai. 

Addressing rapid growth with Dynamics 365 Field Service

Next, PLUG’N ROLL is incorporating Dynamics 365 Field Service to help build a new system for its growing service needs. “Even a few years ago, we only had a few hundred charging stations, confined to a relatively small geographic area,” says Szalai. “We could manage all our service planning in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.” However, as the brand quickly grew to encompass thousands of charging stations across Switzerland, the need to hire external service teams and deploy a new planning solution became clear. “For a situation like this, you need specific software designed for the purpose. When we saw that Dynamics 365 Field Service could meet our requirements, it became unthinkable to use a different technology.” 

The ability to move quickly and create customer-centric solutions on the fly is a key benefit of PLUG’N ROLL’s continued success with Dynamics 365. “We can come up with products that our competitors cannot because they don’t have the solution we built,” says Szalai.