Client Case Studies

Large Utility Company - Transparent Utility and Real-time Operations Management

Business Challenges

A Large Utility Company is the fourth-largest combination electricity and natural gas energy company in the U.S. It offers a comprehensive portfolio of energy-related products and services to 3.3 million electricity customers and 1.8 million natural gas customers. Having regulated operations in 11 Western and Midwestern states, and revenue of $7.9 billion annually; the utility company owns over 260,000 conductor miles of electricity transmission and distribution lines, and more than 32,000 miles of natural gas pipelines; and operate power plants that generate about 15,433 megawatts of electric power.

However, in this faced paced environment, being one of the largest was not the end all. The large utility company felt the need for progressive thinking while addressing traditional constraints was critical to stay ahead of the rat race. They believed that they needed to prove to a slow industry that there are other ways of doing business.

The challenges that they needed addressed were:

• Improve external relationships
• Enable acquisitions and growth
• Integrate new acquisitions and business Cater to customers demanding better service and lower costs
• Comply with changing regulatory controls

The large utility company approached CTE to help them create a vision of the future and a plan for phased implementation.

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Solution

A senior management team from BCI attended CTE’s Cambridge Executive Workshop (CEW), an intensive program where corporate executives and staff collaborate to identify new ideas and move them to deployment.

During the CEW Workshop, the executives felt that transparent Utility would enhance the utility company’s credibility and trust. Thus providing ‘real-time’ visibility across departments, processes and jurisdictions would be the way forward.

Common data views and processes reduce operating costs and improve timeliness of response (for e.g. GE and 6-Sigma efforts). This would reduce management time spent on searching for elusive data; thus enabling faster decision-making.

CTE suggested the Transparent Utility, which is the application (and policies) that will enable the utility company to have a ‘real-time’ view of the enterprise from many different angles (for e.g. Operations, Quality of Service, etc.). The utility company can choose to provision select data sets to partners such as the media, regulators and the finance community.
Additionally, Real-time Operations Management would leverage mobile and Internet technologies to connect 2,500 the utility company field operations staff to the enterprise in real-time.

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Benefits

CTE experts realized that the custom ERP application at the customer site met all the business requirements and functions, but that the client-server technology was limiting the integration of data from all the plants in real time. CTE proposed the migration of the current application from client-server architecture to the web-based architecture of Oracle application server 10g. Changes were made in the application to facilitate consolidation of information from all the plants. The migrated application had minimum possible changes in the user interface, thereby avoiding training and re-learning.

CTE could wrap up the migration process within 6 months, ensuring uniform vendor management across all the locations and improved overall operational efficiency of the organization.

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