Observability boosts availability of digital service channels for Cemig

Supporting digital transformation

In 2020, Cemig (Companhia Energética de Minas Gerais) started a massive digital transformation project in all business areas, with the goal to improve services to their nine million customers. This made it harder to manage the technology environment.

The pandemic forced Cemig’s physical agencies to close temporarily, so they had to improve their digital services. These services included Cemig’s Virtual Agency, an online platform where customers can request electricity reconnections, check their consumption history, request copies of their bills, pay bills and update their data.

According to Marcelo Dieguez, IT and Telecom operations manager at Cemig, this new reality of digital-first contact with customers and the addition of new services meant that support became more crucial. The organization had to be more proactive in solving problems and addressing issues.

Partnering to improve observability

To monitor the performance of their ecosystems, Cemig decided to invest on Cisco AppDynamics (AppD), a solution that makes it easy to solve technical issues affecting application performance by giving management a complete view of the availability of processes. "With AppD, we have better quality information, so we can quickly close gaps in performance. This makes us more efficient and proactive," explains Dieguez.

As a leading Cisco partner in Brazil and globally, NTT DATA, assisted with every step of the implementation. Our analysts were allocated to Cemig on a full-time basis and shared their expertise with the analysts on the Cemig team.

Proactive monitoring boosts customer experience

"AppDynamics was fundamental. With AppD’s constant monitoring, we were able to act proactively and address performance gaps, long before these issues could affect our customers," Dieguez explains. "As a result, we managed to reduce instabilities, which ultimately had a positive impact on our customers."

The project also optimized the use of Cemig’s internal workforce. "In our 24x7 Operations Center, with the alerts sent by AppD, we can detect what the problem is and where it is more precisely and direct it to the responsible team. This means we no longer have to allocate a large portion of our workforce to resolving a problem," says Dieguez.

These positives outcomes motivated Cemig to expand the project. They purchased additional licenses so that AppD can monitor the availability of every SAP unit they use. "When a specific SAP process is slow, AppD detects which environment is affected and sends an alert," Dieguez elaborates "This gives us detailed and precise visibility of everything taking place in our enterprise resource planning (ERP) system."

The organization also changed their platform from an on-premises environment to the cloud. This helps them to manage server availability more effectively and save on storage costs in data centers. "Cloud has been a great ally," says Dieguez. "As we delegate these infrastructure operations processes, we can focus on our core business, and invest in more strategic activities for our future growth. We hope to continue expanding the use of AppD to other areas of the organization."