Energy operations

Operational management

Back-office operations for Iberian retailers and aggregators: switching and ATR exchange with the DSOs, customer service, mandatory regulatory submissions to the Ministerio and the CNMC, and the day-to-day workstreams that keep the retail licence in good standing.

The back office of an Iberian retailer is the unsexy half of the operation and the half that determines whether the licence stays in good standing. A retailer that gets switching wrong loses customers to a competitor without the customer realising they have been switched. A retailer that gets ATR settlement wrong has DSO invoices the business cannot reconcile. A retailer that misses a CNMC filing finds out about it through a sanction letter.

This pillar covers four deliverables. Each is operationally intense and benefits from a managed-service rather than a one-off build.

1. Switching and ATR

The retail-licence operating model in Spain runs on the SIPS data exchange with the eight major DSOs (e-distribución, i-DE, UFD, Viesgo, Hidrocantábrico, plus the regional DSOs). Portugal runs the equivalent exchange with e-Redes. The formats are documented but not stable; the timing windows are tight; and the exception rate on a 50,000-customer portfolio is non-trivial.

Deliverable scope:

Switching process design covering the inbound, outbound and rectification flows
ATR data-exchange operations against the eight Spanish DSOs and Portuguese e-Redes
Exception handling for the common dispute types (CUPS mismatches, postal code disputes, tariff-code disputes, P1-P6 period mismatches)
Monthly switching analytics: gross add, gross loss, net position, time-in-switch, exception rate
Customer churn root-cause analysis tied to the switching data

Typical engagement: 8 to 12 weeks of build, with strongly recommended managed-service follow-on.

Related reading: Switching and ATR with the Iberian DSOs.

2. Back office

The back-office workstream covers everything that is not purchasing, not customer-facing and not regulatory reporting. In practice, this is the operational machinery that makes the retailer commercially viable:

Invoice generation and dispatch
Direct debit collection and dunning
Bad-debt management and write-off
Customer-data management (CRM hygiene, address changes, ownership transfers)
Document management (contracts, terms of service, marketing claims audit trails)

Deliverable scope:

Back-office process design and process documentation
System integration mapping (CRM, billing engine, switching engine, regulatory reporting)
KPI design and monthly reporting
Continuous improvement programme for unit-cost reduction

Typical engagement: programme of 6 to 12 months with quarterly review cadence, or a focused workstream on a specific back-office function.

3. Customer service

The customer service function in an Iberian retailer serves three distinct populations: residential customers on the regulated PVPC tariff and on free-market offers, SME customers on bilateral contracts, and the smaller volume of corporate customers under structured products. Each population has different complaint patterns, different regulatory complaint-handling obligations and different margins to support the service cost.

Deliverable scope:

Customer service operating model covering the three populations
Complaint-handling process aligned to CNMC requirements
Channel mix (voice, email, chat, in-app) tuned to the customer cost-to-serve
Quality monitoring and continuous improvement
Integration with the back-office and billing operations so complaints route to root cause rather than recur

Typical engagement: 8 to 16 weeks of build, with optional managed-service operating-model takeover for retailers that prefer to outsource the function.

4. Submission of reports to authorities

The Iberian retail licence carries a calendar of mandatory filings. The major recipients are the Ministerio para la Transición Ecológica (MITECO), the CNMC, the system operators (REE in Spain, REN in Portugal) and the market operator (OMIE). The cadence ranges from daily settlement reports to annual operating returns. Each filing has its own format, its own validation rules and its own sanction exposure for misses.

Deliverable scope:

Regulatory filing calendar covering all mandatory submissions
Process design and ownership assignment for each filing
Validation and pre-submission review against the authority's published rules
Audit trail and version control across filings
Sanction-risk monitoring and early-warning escalation

Typical engagement: 6 to 10 weeks of build, with strongly recommended ongoing managed support given the calendar weight and the sanction exposure.

How this pillar typically engages

The back-office workstreams are the foundation of every other pillar. A retailer with weak switching operations is losing customers without seeing why; a retailer with weak regulatory submissions is one missed filing from a sanction; a retailer with weak customer service is paying to acquire customers it is then losing.

For most retailers, the right starting point is a diagnostic across all four workstreams, with the priority remediation surfaced by the operational data.

AI-led products under this pillar

The four deliverables above are also available as AI-led products that ship as working systems rather than engagements:

Switch. AI validation and exception handling for switching and ATR.
Office. AI-augmented back-office automation.
Serve. Customer service co-pilot for the three retail populations.
File. Regulatory filing assistant covering the full Iberian calendar.

Read the operations products page →

Related pillars

Energy purchasing: forecasting, OMIE / MIBEL / MEFF execution, GdO procurement, billing reconciliation.
Analysis and pricing: pricing design, market reporting, analytics, regulatory monitoring.