Tirreno Power: Flexibility, Progressive Development, and High-Value Service in Procure-to-Pay

Founded in 2003 following the liberalization of the electricity market, Tirreno Power currently manages 2.5 GW across four natural gas combined-cycle power plants—located in Vado Ligure, Civitavecchia (two plants), and Naples North—as well as 19 hydroelectric stations in the Ligurian Apennines. Revenue fluctuates between €600 million and €1.5 billion depending on energy prices, yet the organization remains impressively lean: just 230 employees manage tens of thousands of purchase requests, orders, delivery notes, and invoices each year, along with long-term contracts for fuels, maintenance, insurance, and green certificate trading. 

Antonio Patrone, Chief Financial and Digital Transformation Officer
Fulvio Rappa, Head of Purchasing, Services, and Security Department

During the Yubiq Insights25 event

The Challenge

As recently as 2017, the company’s purchase requests, orders, and invoices were still handled on paper—printed requests sent between plants and headquarters, manually registered invoices with technical attachments, three-week approval cycles, and a high risk of human error. 
Regulatory evolution (including the Public Procurement Code, Legislative Decree 231, ARERA guidelines, and mandatory SDI e-invoicing) required end-to-end traceability. However, the existing ERP lacked the flexibility needed to manage dynamic workflows or quickly adapt to new rules. 
Tirreno Power set three core objectives: eliminate paper dependency, ensure a certified document chain “from budget to payment,” and introduce a flexible process layer without altering the core ERP. 
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The Approach

After a benchmark on energy-intensive realities that were already using the platform, the company adopted Yubiq as its workflow and document management engine while retaining ERP for accounting. The project was released in three waves. The first, in operation since early 2021, covered the entire requisition-order-receipt-invoice-payment axis: Yubiq dialogues with SAP via ArchiveLink and IDoc, while a parametric engine builds approval paths based on cost center, threshold and commodity category. Each digital file collects the signed requisition, order, bill, acceptance certificate, XML/PA invoice and receipt, along with all e-mail exchanges.  

The rollout, concluded just before the second lockdown, ensured remote operational continuity. Once the first wave was stabilized, the platform was extended to subsequent modules by reusing roles, digital signatures and segregation rules: supplier qualification with DURC and screening on international watch-lists, vendor rating on punctuality-quality-safety, bilingual foreign self-billing, subcontract management with CUP, CIG and SAL monitoring, digital personnel file, site access procedures with QR code linked to “safety passport.” The per-process, not per-user, licensing model has enabled the involvement of more than 400 external counterparts without significant additional costs. 

The Impact

The average time between purchase request and order issuance dropped from 18 to 5 working days; for amounts under 5,000 euros, the standard procedure closes in less than 8 hours. The complete receipt-payment cycle went from 27 to 9 days. Invoices with formal errors fell from 9 percent to less than 1.3 percent, thanks to the automatic three-way match before SDI registration. All documents receive SHA-256 imprinting and AgID time stamps; workflow logs unalterably track sequence and time of approvals, contributing to the closure of ISO 9001 and ISO 55001 audits without findings.  

Digitization has streamlined daily operations, with managers signing from tablets via SPID or CNS with traffic light worklists and full-text search (native OCR), while buyers, relieved of reminders, focus on strategic negotiations.  

The database, now enriched by more than eleven million metadata, will be used from 2025 for the Yubiq AI Copilot extension: a Clause Miner that extracts penalties and warranties, a Smart RFP Builder that composes specifications drawing on twenty years of histories, and a Spend Insights suite that segments costs by plant, commodity, and embedded CO₂ to support KPIs required by CSRD. Automated clause extraction alone is estimated to save about 1 600 man hours per year. 


 

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