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Business Problem
Goal: The goal of this project was to implement DevOps automation and an outage management system to reduce downtime, improve system reliability, and increase operational efficiency for the utilities company.
The client is a major utilities company that provides essential services to millions of customers. The company faced significant challenges with its outage management system, which relied on manual processes and was prone to errors and delays. These issues led to customer complaints and a negative impact on the company's reputation. The client recognized the need for a more automated and reliable system to manage outages and improve its overall customer service. They sought the assistance of Pronix to help them implement a DevOps automation solution to address these challenges.
The business problem addressed in this case study is the need for a robust Outage Management system for a major utilities company. With increasing customer expectations, the company is facing challenges in improving outage restoration and meeting those expectations.
The current Outage Management system (OMS) is not capable of handling the complex network of energy distribution operations effectively and efficiently. This results in longer restoration time, increased uncertainty and inefficiency in energy distribution operations. This leads to customer dissatisfaction and negative impact on the company's reputation.
Additionally, the company is facing challenges in safeguarding workers and the public during outages. The current OMS does not provide enough information to make informed decisions and take necessary actions to protect workers and the public.
To address these challenges, the company needs to integrate a robust Outage Management system that can improve restoration time, efficiency, and uncertainties of energy distribution operations. In addition, the company needs to integrate a Network Management System (NMS) like Oracle Utilities Network Management System, which helps utilities safeguard workers and the public during outages.
Overall, the goal of this case study is to improve outage restoration and meet increasing customer expectations by integrating a robust Outage Management system and NMS like Oracle Utilities Network Management System.
Business Solution
The business solution for this case study is to integrate a robust Outage Management system (OMS) and a Network Management System (NMS) like Oracle Utilities Network Management System to improve outage restoration and meet increasing customer expectations.
To achieve this, the company implemented an Outage Dashboard that is used by various departments throughout the company to view information about customers who have no power, the number of customers restored, and the estimated time of restoration (ETR). Additionally, the Outage Dashboard displays information of customers with medical emergencies and other priority customers. This allows for better communication and coordination between departments during outages.
In addition, the company transitioned various OMS users to use the Outage Dashboard in lieu of the OMS application. The goal of this transition is to reduce the number of users currently using OMS, streamlining the process and making it more efficient. By implementing OMS functionality into the Dashboard that is needed by certain users to complete their daily tasks, without having to access the Outage Management System.
By integrating a robust OMS and NMS, the company was able to improve outage restoration time, efficiency and uncertainties of energy distribution operations. This led to increased customer satisfaction and a positive impact on the company's reputation. Additionally, the integration of NMS helped the company to safeguard workers and the public during outages.
Overall, the solution implemented in this case study has helped the company to improve its outage management system, meet increasing customer expectations, improve restoration time, and increase efficiency.
Technical Solution
The technical solution for this case study aimed to improve the back-end suite of applications by mitigating contention problems, improving the accuracy of network data, and implementing a notification system. The step-by-step process included:
Implementing customer call integration to the Oracle Utilities Network Management System (NMS) through a Java application that polls call information from the DB2 database.
Retrieving and transferring device topological statuses to the NMS SCADA system through a SOAP web service to provide real-time information on device status.
Performing periodic updates on customer model database tables to keep the NMS data accurate and up-to-date.
Extracting GIS electrical data by circuit for NMS data modeling, improving the NMS's understanding of the network.
Developing a module for capturing interruption information associated with electric power outages and storing it on a client-supported Data Analyzer system for reporting.
Creating a notification system for business users to receive notifications when there is a significant number of outages or customers out, which is configurable for customer and incident counts.
The technical solution helped the company to improve its outage management system, meet increasing customer expectations, improve restoration time, and increase efficiency.
Technologies Used
The technical solution for this case study involved the use of a variety of technologies to improve the company's Outage Management system and meet increasing customer expectations.
The primary programming language used in this case study was Java 1.8 and the application was built on J2EE architecture. Data connectivity was achieved through JDBC and communication between the different systems was done using SOAP, REST, and WSDL protocols. Data was passed between systems in XML format and XSLT was used for transformation of data.
The solution was built on Spring framework, specifically Spring Boot, which provided a robust and flexible architecture for the application. Hibernate was used as the ORM tool to interact with the database. ActiveMQ was used for message queuing, which helped in the integration of different systems.
The solution used a combination of PostgreSQL, Oracle11g and DB2 as the databases. The application was developed on UNIX operating systems and JUnit was used for unit testing. The application was deployed on Tomcat servers and was developed using Eclipse IDE and TFS. SQLDeveloper and PGAdmin were used as SQL clients and Maven and Ant were used as build tools.
Overall, the implementation of this case study used a wide range of technologies to provide a robust and efficient Outage Management system that helped the company to improve restoration time, increase efficiency, and meet increasing customer expectations.
Customer Success Outcomes
Reduced outage duration: The implementation of the DevOps automation solution resulted in a reduction of outage duration by up to 40%.
Increased system availability: The solution helped to improve the availability of the systems by up to 99.9%.
Improved efficiency: The DevOps automation solution reduced the amount of manual effort required for outage management by up to 90%.
Cost savings: The client was able to reduce their operating expenses by up to 30% through the implementation of the DevOps automation solution.
Improved customer satisfaction: The solution helped to improve the overall customer experience by reducing the frequency and duration of outages, resulting in higher customer satisfaction.
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