| Regulatory Compliance for a critical Customer Information System - We enable competition, for a large UK Gas utility |
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| The challenge |
| OFGEM, the UK Gas and Electric Industry Regulator, has a statutory duty to secure effective competition in services which are ancillary to gas supply. These services include Meter Reading. The Regulator's power in this regard has been reinforced with the introduction of the Competition Act effective from 1st March 2000. This had a direct impact on the Meter Reading Services and IT systems of our client. The client, in its role as Public Gas Transporter (PGT) and Meter Reader has a key role to play in enabling the development of competition and ensuring that it's Meter Reading Service (MRS) does not have any unfair competitive advantage over other Meter Readers. A major source of perceived unfair competitive advantage to the Meter Reading Services is the use of computer systems and data for meter reading purposes where those systems / data have been developed primarily for use in gas transportation activities. This is seen as an example of meter reading activities (in a competitive market) being cross subsidised by PGT activities (which are essentially in a monopoly situation). The client, is UK's largest Gas storage and transport company and is responsible for piping gas to over 19 million Industrial and domestic customers. |
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| The solution |
To resolve this situation, the client had to separate their meter reading activities out of the PGT systems into a new stand-alone meter reading system. Meter points currently read by MRS as part of the Bundled service will be set to Unbundled, and the Shippers (Customers) responsible for them need to obtain meter readings from the new MRS and pass these readings as Unbundled reads. Wipro has been involved in the business process analysis, requirements analysis, system design and application development. Wipro was responsible for the complete logical and physical database design. The high volume of data and the performance requirements were factored into the design process. Wipro was also involved in the data migration activity, which involved transferring from the existing database (bundled) to the new database after applying the new business logic and constraints. Other challenges for Wipro included, managing different file formats at the time of data migration and handling data from multiple inputs. Based on the functionality of the system and the User priorities a phased approach was used. In the initial phases, the core of the system was developed and delivered to the client. In the subsequent phases, the remaining application was developed around this core.
This project was data intensive in its execution; the following metrics give a snippet of The challenges faced by Wipro, during implementation.
- Total Number of users: 200
- Total Number of Meter Reading Agencies (MRA) supplied readings: 8.9 million/yr
- Total Number of files containing readings: 15,000/yr
- Average Number of reads received: 33,700/day
- Peak Number of reads received: 72,000/day
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| The benefits |
The main benefits as perceived by the client were:
- Helped the client to meet the compliance norm on time and avoided penalty payments.
- Thorough Data Analysis, helped in tuning performance.
- End to End Value added consultancy to the project.
- Significant Cost benefits by the usage of offshore facilities
- The phased approach facilitated better testing of the application by the Users/Clients.
- User Environment Simulation at the development centre, ensured superior quality
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