Utilities

[Steve Bennett]

Gas, Water, Electric - you get the idea

[Steve Bennett]

Sydney Water rips up IT to make business intelligent

By: Darren Pauli - Computerworld Australia (02 Sep 2008)

Replacing an ailing data collection system helped utility save millions

SYDNEY - Sydney Water will save more than A$1.6 million (US$1.37 million) in operational expenditure after it replaced its ailing data collection system with an enterprise business intelligence platform.

The platform will organize a multitude of unstructured data streams into useful information which will make maintenance and control easier and cheaper, and create a standard, transparent backbone for new IT projects to plug into.

The water utility, the largest in Australia with 3,000 staff and 4,000 IT users, supplies drinkable water to more than 4 million people across Sydney. It has more than $20 billion worth of assets and an operation expenditure of $1.3 billion with a $40 million IT budget.

The $5 million BI project is part of an organization-wide IT overhaul which will see improvements to data analytics, information management, data center operations, and its Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.

An IT assessment was conducted in 2005 after the old siloed system had given managers conflicting information on water distribution and infrastructure management which was presented in executive reports.

Sydney Water strategy and architecture manager Trent Brown said a BI system was needed to integrate its disparate systems and to standardize data records. “We needed more transparency and centralization of our systems,” Brown said.

“Both the monitoring of the water and our water network operations provided us with useful information however, each system was quite isolated and it was difficult and time consuming to report and measure against.

“We have been able to reduce the water monitoring reporting processes from four days per month to a few hours and operational savings of $265,000 per year [and] our network operations have been reduced by 50 per cent in terms of planning practices.”

The BI platform aggregates data from water monitoring systems that track water levels, pressures and instruments, along with network operation platforms, asset maintenance, customer service, and financial applications. Sydney Water will save $310,000 a year in operating expenditures (OPEX) through its 257-user BI finance system that will streamline budget and expenditure, improve data integrity and cut down dependencies on long-serving staff. A whopping $750,000 OPEX will be saved each year through its BI asset maintenance system, which has recently entered construction.

The organization's new water network BI solution has saved $289,000 OPEX each year through a 2,100Gbyte data feed which sorts important data critical to plant operations from the noise. The system has 25 users and has reduced reliance on individual employees. A further $265,000 OPEX a year was saved through its water monitoring BI tool that provides 450G bytes of water quality data to Sydney Water laboratories. A number of small data centers were consolidated into a single repository, and its EMC storage systems were upgraded to accommodate the increased data streams.

Sydney Water picked the Business Objects XI r2 platform for front-end analytics and used its Enterprise Information Management suite for data management in the data center. Rick Eager, local country manager for Sydney Water's IT services integrator Patni Computer Systems, said IT attitudes were shaken up and executive support was obtained to make the IT transformation possible. “The project had to go ahead without impacting the business operations, and all staff and business managers had to get on board,” Eager said.

“[Sydney Water] has thousands of assets to keep track of and maintain, which is very difficult, and having a stable platform makes it possible.

“There have been a lot of unforeseen benefits; technicians looking into a dodgy pump that was replaced a few times found out it was a very simple problem by looking at the [BI data].”

Project governance is split between local integrator Oakton, which defines and plans the BI systems; Patni which is responsible for design and build; and Sydney Water, which controls scope and direction.

Eager said the deployment is one of the first instances of government using an Indian offshore integrator. He said there were no cultural or communications problems.

Sydney Water will continue with the implementation of its BI customer service and asset maintenance systems during 2009, and introduce cross subject area analysis and associated data integration, along with dashboards and scorecards to support the system.

[admin2]

Content management and business intelligence high on agenda

Rodney Gedda 03 August, 2009 08:48 Computerworld

NSW government water supply utility Sydney Water is seeking program and project delivery services for two of its “pathfinder” programs, both of which are in IT.

At Sydney Water, pathfinder programs define and establish new strategic IT business capabilities.

The two IT programs are the Sydney Water Information Management (SWIM) program, designed to raise Sydney Water’s information management capability and provide a platform for future improvements; and the business intelligence (BI) program aimed at designing an architecture, platform, competency centre, new operating models, business processes and behaviours based on the Business Objects (SAP-owned) suite.

A common BI environment is now used by some 600 Sydney Water staff.

“[Pathfinder programs] are typically enterprise wide, do not a follow a well proven path and accordingly will comprise a significant element of organisational discovery and development of new intellectual property,” according to the department.

Consequently, pathfinder programs are run from the IT strategy and architecture team and require engagement with Sydney Water enterprise architects and business IT leaders.

Sydney Water is seeking a contracting role “to ensure the successful delivery of assigned programs” with an initial term of three years and options for two more one-year periods.

In addition, subsequent pathfinder programs may also draw on the services available under this contract.

The objectives of the SWIM program are to deploy information management capabilities needed to improve document management for “consistent management of electronic documents in a single system with record keeping and security”; collaboration to support team work on documents during projects; and workflow for automating “our manual and paper intensive processes” to improve performance and reduce paper.

SWIM also involves Web publishing to improve communications and searching to creating a single place to search for information stored in disparate locations.

According to Sydney Water, “The SWIM program is based on the Oracle Unified Content Management System product and an enterprise search technology that is currently being procured.

“The ECM and enterprise search solutions are to being provisioned via an IBM Portal Server environment.”

Sydney Water's BI strategy is focused on increasing demands from regulators and improving insights and planning processes across its business units.

The BI program has been developing since 2006 and, to date, has delivered two capability projects and five business solution projects within the areas of water monitoring (Monitoring & EKAMS systems), water network operations (IICATS system), finance and people management.

BI projects in progress are safety, asset maintenance (Maximo system) and customer relations.

Sydney Water has more than $20 billion in assets, some 3200 staff, and a capital expenditure program of about $1.2 billion for 2008 to 2009.

[admin2]

Software as a service ruled out, open source solution unlikely

Rodney Gedda 16 January, 2008 11:19 Computerworld

With multiple disparate applications managing customer interactions, Sydney Water will invest in a fit-for-purpose CRM system to improve its levels of customer service.

By its own admission, Sydney Water's "unconnected applications" used to manage "interactions" with customers is not sustainable as it is "compromising" some key systems, most notably the ACCESS billing system, and is "hampering Sydney Water's ability to deliver appropriate levels of customer service".

In a tender document released by the state government owned statutory corporation, the term CRM has been watered down to "customer management system", which will be run in-house and not hosted by the supplier.

"Sydney Water has decided to host [the] software on its own infrastructure and will not accept tender responses which propose to supply the product to Sydney Water as software for services [sic]," according to one document.

That leaves SaaS vendors with the only option to offer their software as a traditional in-house enterprise application.

Furthermore, as this request for tender is for the supply of software only, Sydney Water will only accept responses from entities that "own, or who are part of the same corporate group which owns, the intellectual property in the product which is being offered".

Where that leaves suppliers of open source CRM software is open to interpretation.

Despite being an "open tender", Sydney Water will only accept proposals from software providers and third-party reseller responses will not be accepted, and a separate tender will be requested for systems integration of the chosen software at a later date.

The new software also forms part of CIO Tim Catley's vision for more Web-based front ends at Sydney Water so it doesn't matter if staff are in the office, in an Internet cafe, or using their mobile phone, they can access the application.

Capgemini was engaged to assist in the development of business process specifications and the requirements definitions, and, as such, is excluded from tendering for any further part of the customer management system project.

Sydney Water has retained Capgemini in a quality assurance and advisory capacity for the duration of this CMS project.

The requirements of the product include:

- A comprehensive and easily accessible view of both customer and property profiles and history, enabling staff to provide informed and proactive customer service.

- An integrated business platform to automate and support efficient customer management processes and workflow.

- Multi-channel customer servicing capability to support call centre, field based and self service access as well as supporting e-mail and Internet channels.

- Campaign management functionality to better enable customer targeting, quicker campaign design, control of the customer experience and improved communications.

Billing functionality is specifically excluded as a capability of the new software.

A proof of concept stage will be performed followed by a "foundation" where functionality will be tested, then online self-service, and additional modules like campaign management, field mobility, and linking to business intelligence tools will be implemented.

With more than 3000 staff, Sydney Water has assets with a replacement value of more than $20 billion and a capital expenditure program of more than $1 billion planned for 2007 and 2008.

[admin2]

$5 million overall slashes operational cost

Darren Pauli 01 September, 2008 13:24 Computerworld

Sydney Water will save more than $1.6 million in operational expenditure (OPEX) after it replaced its ailing data collection system with an enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform.

The platform will organise a multitude of unstructured data streams into useful information which will make maintenance and control easier and cheaper, and create a standard, transparent backbone for new IT projects to plug into.

The water utility, the largest in Australia with 3000 staff and 4000 IT users, supplies drinkable water to more than 4 million people across Sydney. It has more than $20 billion worth of assets and an operation expenditure of $1.3 billion with a $40 million IT budget.

The $5 million BI project is part of an organisation-wide IT overhaul which will see improvements to data analytics, information management, data centre operations, and its Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.

An IT assessment was conducted in 2005 after the old siloed system had given managers conflicting information on water distribution and infrastructure management which was presented in executive reports.

Sydney Water strategy and architecture manager Trent Brown said a BI system was needed to integrate its disparate systems and to standardise data records.

“We needed more transparency and centralisation of our systems,” Brown said.

“Both the monitoring of the water and our water network operations provided us with useful information however, each system was quite isolated and it was difficult and time consuming to report and measure against.

“We have been able to reduce the water monitoring reporting processes from four days per month to a few hours and operational savings of $265,000 per year [and] our network operations have been reduced by 50 per cent in terms of planning practices.”

The BI platform aggregates data from water monitoring systems that track water levels, pressures and instruments, along with network operation platforms, asset maintenance, customer service, and financial applications.

Sydney Water will save $310,000 in OPEX a year through its 257-user BI finance system that will streamline budget and expenditure, improve data integrity and cut down dependencies on long-serving staff. A whopping $750,000 OPEX will be saved each year through its BI asset maintenance system, which has recently entered construction.

The organisation's new water network BI solution has saved $289,000 OPEX each year through a 2100GB data feed which sorts important data critical to plant operations from the noise. The system has 25 users and has reduced reliance on individual employees.

A further $265,000 OPEX a year was saved through its water monitoring BI tool that provides 450GB of water quality data to Sydney Water laboratories. A number of small data centres were consolidated into a single repository, and its EMC storage systems were upgraded to accommodate the increased data streams.

Sydney Water picked the Business Objects XI r2 platform for front-end analytics and used its Enterprise Information Management suite for data management in the data centre.

Rick Eager, local country manager for Sydney Water's IT services integrator Patni Computer Systems, said IT attitudes were shaken up and executive support was obtained to make the IT transformation possible.

“The project had to go ahead without impacting the business operations, and all staff and business managers had to get on board,” Eager said.

“[Sydney Water] has thousands of assets to keep track of and maintain, which is very difficult, and having a stable platform makes it possible.

“There have been a lot of unforeseen benefits; technicians looking into a dodgy pump that was replaced a few times found out it was a very simple problem by looking at the [BI data].”

Project governance is split between local integrator Oakton, which defines and plans the BI systems; Patni which is responsible for design and build; and Sydney Water, which controls scope and direction.

Eager said the deployment is one of the first instances of government using an Indian offshore integrator. He said there were no cultural or communications problems.

Sydney Water will continue with the implementation of its BI customer service and asset maintenance systems during 2009, and introduce cross subject area analysis and associated data integration, along with dashboards and scorecards to support the system.

[admin2]

Nate Cochrane | Jul 28, 2009 CRN

CRN spoke to consultant Marchment Hill on the future of the smart grid.

CRN: What are the benefits for electricity distributors and retailers, consumers and third-parties such as system integrators?

Marchment Hill: One of the very interesting aspects of smart meters is that we can begin to inform customers [about the electricity they use] so their decisions to turn on the switch are more informed.

Smart metering is the first step to smart grids committed to in Victoria. Energy Australia has a smart grid initiative they're progressing in NSW but that will probably start in earnest with smart metering initiatives.

The distribution businesses, as they start deploying, will start to realise operational improvements from being able to collect data remotely (in half-hour increments or daily) rather than having a meter reader.

Communication with those meters provides the ability for close to real-time identification of faults in their control room, allowing them to deploy field crews to rectify those problems faster, thus improving network reliability. There's a flow-on effect to customers in reduced downtime.

In terms of information, it will be vastly greater than what electricity distributors had previously. They should be able to manage capital improvements better and invest more efficiently to deliver electrical services to consumers. So distributors will get the first lot of benefits.

From a retailer's perspective, the benefits around smart metering will be driven by a significant increase in the amount of information available to organisations. Being able to slice and dice and analyse the information will help inform them on energy procurement.

So wholesale energy purchasers should benefit and customer segmentation will be enhanced by load profiles of customers and matching retail pricing to wholesale costs in a way they've not been able to do.

In the current environment every customer with a simple accumulation meter has the same profile, where in future you'll have specific information about each specific customer and electricity providers will be able to group their customers. They may have done that in the past based on assumptions (such as their demographic) but they'll be able to do it with more certainty using smart meters.

The benefits to consumers are an ability for retailers to send messages to consumers through the communication system set up and linkages to in-home display devices that could be put into a customer's premises. And electricity retailers will be able to develop new products and services.

In-home display is not something being mandated or incorporated in smart meter programs. They're seen as infrastructure to communicate to in-home devices. But electricity retailers will either package up or customers might be able to go down the road to Dick Smith and buy a device like that to talk to the electricity meter. That will develop over time as retailers have products and services to offer and as their understanding of the market potential evolves.

CRN: Are we likely to see variable tariffs that charge consumers more based on the time of day and their marginal rate of electricity use?

MH: Some issues around less well-off electricity consumers (such as the unemployed and pensioners) may never come because there may be too much political opposition to it (variable tariffs).

The Government has a green program related to energy efficiency in homes and companies, offering in-home displays where you could have your house audited or get software to manage your house's power use, based on smart meters that can monitor your home in real-time.

The companies providing such services are generally new and relatively small ; they're waiting on regulation around energy efficiency in homes to be finalised. But even now they've already got home assessors and contractors lined up, ready to go and in future they'll want to install software that will read your meter.

We're also aware that bigger companies not directly involved in the energy space are getting interested. Any organisation with powerful IT systems, mass market retail experience and strong logistics could potentially play in this space.

The key thing with this change is it's very hard to see where it will go but with more technology and more data it will be possible to extract value from that data. The electricity industry has well-established processes and systems they may find it difficult to move at the speed of smaller, new companies.

There's lots of risk for big electricity companies in the new, smart meter technology. For them, this change probably represents more of a risk than an opportunity. The newer thinkers, and they're circling, are the ones that probably have the most to gain.

Major telecommunications players have looked at the option of the electricity market but shied away from it because the risks were hard to manage on the wholesale side.

There's going to be an extraordinary sheer volume of data that needs to be managed and mined and businesses that can do those things stand to win - there's a significant market opportunity. The internal capability of existing retailers to mine their data probably isn't as developed as in other retail businesses because it's had very simple up until now.

We haven't heard of IT integrators working with electrical retailers on business intelligence systems.

An interesting aspect is the extent to which consumers will choose to change behaviour based on real-time information and tariffs based on time of use and shifting their patterns. There's no research that says people are itching to behave in different ways. British research found 7 percent of 1500 households showed some interest in changing demand patterns, and of them only 10 percent made a material change to the electricity bills by shifting demand. Without a sustained education program and communication program to the community, they're not well-prepared to receive messages about options they'll receive in the future.

At the same time, nearly a million individual and business consumers in Australia have elected to purchase green power, so there is already a substantial group of informed and engaged consumers out there.

There are parallels around other social obligations such as with water restrictions where people guilt neighbours into not watering their gardens during times of drought and peak water use.

Electricity prices are slated to continue rising and the extent to which a carbon price or need for new generation has to flow on to the retail sector provides a carrot as a social instrument to do something about it yourself as a consumer.

Another major factor will be the introduction of electric vehicles. If these become a significant part of the automotive sector in the next five to 10 years that will change demand for electricity. Retailers will want (and need) information about who's charging when and where. The whole electricity sector will need to manage the impact of growth in electric vehicle use and it will be important to plan for that.

We believe that electric vehicles will come in scale and in the next 20 years. The hypothesis that re-charging electric vehicles will flatten out the electricity demand profile over the course of the day could be true provided the cars are recharged in a very smart way.

Telecommunications and software will be needed to allow such a large appliance to be sympathetic to network needs and generation price. EVs have the potential to fill in valleys in the demand curve but not to cap peak demand . A well-managed implementation of electric vehicles with sensible charging is the best opportunity that distribution businesses have to change their profitability over the next 10 to 15 years.

They have the potential to move so much more product down the existing infrastructure at low risk. A badly managed implementation, non-smart management of that large energy demand could throw up some really significant operating challenges.

Some in the electricity business are implementing projects today and going out through tenders. Others may be exposed to it but haven't thought strategically about impacts, and others are preparing so there's a variety of awareness about what smart grids and smart businesses mean. Those businesses can look at this and understand the value chain and where smart metering or smart grids can identify that potential value.

CRN: Where can resellers plug the gaps in utilities' skills?

MH: There's a lot of opportunity in the data management area. At the moment for a domestic customer a retail business would receive one or two items of data every three months but when they put a smart meter in they will get 48 items of data a day. They will have to create databases to receive that data and they will have to work out what they do with that data from a billing perspective and how they can use it internally.

There are dozens of small retailers [such as Red Energy] out there that will be hungry for competitive advantage so an IT reseller that can provide a turnkey solution to make sense of data and provide better customer information would be in a good position to get that business.

Those smaller electricity retailers with 50,000-100,000 customers will be very keen to make sense of it quickly ahead of legacy systems that are harder to turn around. A relatively small IT reseller could go to a relatively small retailer and come up with some interesting ideas.

CRN: When should resellers start thinking about hooking up with the smart grid?

MH: If you're an IT or systems developer you need to be thinking about it now. If you are a mum and dad customer do we need to worry? Not at all. If they change the meter on my house tomorrow it won't make much difference to me. If the government changes the tariff structure or deregulates it completely then I will be interested because I'll have some control over my electricity use.

It depends where your interest is. Just as it happened in telecommunications 20 years ago when the sector was deregulated, you can't underestimate what opportunities open up with the smart grid. If there's much more granularity of communication we can't imagine now what opportunities open up for business in the next 15 to 20 years.

Marchment Hill consults to utilities, infrastructure and resources industries. This is an edited transcript.

Your deep-dive guide to smart grids

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[admin]

Online portal improves water monitoring

Jennifer Foreshew | November 03, 2009

A DATA integration system that provides unprecedented access to the health of southeast Queensland waterways could be used for other regions in Australia and internationally.

Cross post here.

[admin]

The Rust Report

Western Power, the WA Government's electricity distribution business, has selected Sydney-based Holocentric to provide its Modelpedia hosted enterprise modelling environment. The system will be used to help Western Power improve the way it operates. "It's all about creating a paradigm of continuous change in the business," a spokesman explained. Holocentric business process modeling and collaboration software for better change outcomes