A global energy company with 21,000 staff boosted speed-to-delivery with virtual whiteboarding and collaboration workspace Miro.
According to Laura Farbo, Miro partner marketing manager, Miro virtual whiteboarding is accelerating cloud-based projects at Centrica and generating savings.
“Putting Miro at the heart of their cloud-based projects, Centrica was able to increase the speed of decision making by sharing knowledge in a single Miro board rather than multiple repositories,” Farbo wrote via Miro’s website.
In addition, the energy firm was able to design and prototype faster using Miro‘s technical diagramming capabilities. Also, staff could understand design costs by using Miro’s integrated AWS cost calculator.
Virtual whiteboarding helps large legacy firm
The 200-year-old energy company had 6,800 engineers, and served some 10 million customers worldwide.
“Centrica has been keeping the lights on at UK homes since the industrial revolution. But its challenge today is keeping pace with the technological revolution,” she wrote.
“Customers still value a visit from an engineer, but also want faster, easier, and better ways to solve issues.”
Therefore Centrica’s internal technology team sought to create repeatable, scaleable processes that could speed up product delivery.
Previously, the business units relied on multiple tools. Teams would brainstorm an idea in one place, design a solution in another, and share prototypes somewhere else, she added.
“[So] Miro replaced multiple fragmented tools with a single workspace for stand-ups, technical diagramming, and cost calculations,” Farbo wrote.
“With improved access, knowledge sharing and collaboration, Centrica can deliver products faster.”
Previously, they’d need to trawl repositories, download a diagramming file, comment, re-version and re-upload it. This was siloed work that took longer, she noted.
AWS integration reduces engineering burden
Because Miro integrated with AWS and Microsoft software, the company could deploy it beyond just brainstorming or ideation. Miro supported more than 160 different integrations.
“And one year from now, if you want to see how you built everything, it’s still sitting in a Miro board for you,” added Titu Joseph Rajan, Centrica head of integration.
Now, customers could sometimes diagnose and fix their own boilers. Since a January 2025 launch, the company shaved two percent off its field engineering requirement. In addition, data could be collected for faster issue diagnosis.
The service was underpinned by an AWS Serverless architecture-based decision engine.
So far, the platform supported solutions for 35% of boiler types. However, all commonly used boiler models were set to be included, with all customer-facing channels given access, Farbo wrote.
“It is projected to avoid approximately 60,000 engineer visits annually,” she wrote.
( Photo by ThisisEngineering on Unsplash )