|
|
Energy Leader Gaining Competitive Advantage with Near-Real-Time Application Integration |
The Business: The Company is the parent company of a major Southern California utility. As a highly regulated utility, most of its business is tied in long term state and local government contracts that provide steady business, but slow growth. After the industry deregulation in California, the Company began building new utilities to bolster its unregulated business. With this expansion, the Company needed to improve the execution of its power generation, trading and planning capabilities.
The Challenge:
: Imagine trading stocks with no data about the companies, their stocks, and trade volumes on the exchange -- no Dow Jones or no Bloomberg. Electricity is the only commodity in the world that is traded every hour of the day. In the absence of timely information, prices are subject to wild fluctuations. Even good guesses about supply and demand are hard to come by. Since AC power cannot be stored in large amounts, the Company needs to operate in a zero inventory, zero latency mode, and optimize all aspects of the business.
Beginning 2003, the Company was deploying a number of business applications to operate the power plants. Information about the power generation, distribution, maintenance costs were collected, stored, and maintained within the Company. Seamless integration of these disparate applications was critical to the Company success. With access to the generation capacity, contractual obligations, buy and sell options for each commodity, operational efficiency, fixed and variable maintenance costs and available surplus power to be traded on the spot market under various market conditions, the Company can leverage its assets to maximize its profits by trading in different markets on a day-to-day basis. With 90% of the production tied in long-term fixed priced contracts, the Company needed to boost profits by trading the remaining 10% capacity at the highest possible price.
The Vision:
: The Company needed a solution that provides an enabled and integrated application for across-the-board analysis to monitor the complexity of power generation across several plants, analysis into several markets, and to gain insight into the entire supply chain and optimize as needed. With such an enabling infrastructure, the Company can implement event driven, proactive and reactive operations
The Solution: Achieving the Company's vision needed a unique systems integration approach. Recognizing that traditional EAI based application integration can lead to lengthy and costly project, e2e delivered a unique Business Intelligence Network with "Hub & Spoke" architecture. With an Operational Data warehouse for storing volatile application data, as well as historical data, trends and metrics with bi-directional application interfaces, the solution allowed for exchange of information among applications, as and when needed, in near-real-time throughout the day. Portals allow management to monitor key performance metrics, trends and curves.
The Benefits: The solution is enabling the Company to monitor performance of all business activities in near-real-time across the energy supply chain. Such a supply chain system integrated with valuable information chain gave the Company an almost unfair competitive advantage.
The Tools: Informatica Power Center, Power Analyzer, SQL Server, Web Services, and SharePoint |
| |
|
|
|
