Published on 30-Sep-2008
"I am very pleased with the level of effort and type of support that IBM was able to provide in this project." - Dennis Eccleston, Chief Information Officer, New York Power Authority
Customer:
New York Power Authority (NYPA)
Industry:
Energy & Utilities
Deployment country:
United States
Solution:
Business Integration, Business Process Management (BPM), Enabling Business Flexibility, Openness, Service Oriented Architecture
Overview
For the many employees and stakeholders of the NYPA, their lot was one of increasing complexity. Four billing systems representing hundreds of investor owned utilities gave rise to overlapping accounting hierarchies. Programmers had to keep up 120 interfaces that had been individually developed using point-to-point programming. As a result, they spent most of their time maintaining existing interfaces and could scarcely find time for new applications.
Business need:
Establish a flexible and reusable enterprise system to simplify the integration of SAP with dozens of external interfaces and incorporate human workflow and data reconciliation into the business process.
Solution:
The New York Power Authority consolidated its billing system, service-enabled SAP® R/3-CCS and integrated four disparate systems through the use of IBM WebSphere® Message Broker, Process Server and Adapter for SAP Software. Using a Smart SOA™ (service oriented architecture) connectivity platform with reusable components, the organization was able to simplify connectivity and deploy a consistent set of business processes.
Benefits:
Reduction in development time for new applications and interfaces
Increased productivity from IT and business professionals
Improved data integrity, billing accuracy and customer satisfaction
Case Study
Although Governor Charles Evans Hughes began the effort that led to the New York Power Authority (NYPA) in 1907, it was Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt who established New York’s model for public power through legislation signed in 1931. Today the NYPA is the largest state-owned power organization in the U.S.
The NYPA was designed to be a non-profit source of electrical power from which New York’s investor owned utilities (IOUs) could buy power at no markup, provided by the NYPA’s generating facilities. This has simplified power distribution throughout the state and benefited the consumer, reducing costs that could have risen had the state not stepped in at an early stage.
Challenge: Reduce internal complexity
For the many employees and stakeholders of the NYPA, their lot was one of increasing complexity. Four billing systems representing hundreds of investor owned utilities gave rise to overlapping accounting hierarchies. Programmers had to keep up 120 interfaces that had been individually developed using point-to-point programming. As a result, they spent most of their time maintaining existing interfaces and could scarcely find time for new applications.
“The industry under deregulation was also forcing us to provide more stakeholders with access to customer information,” says Dennis Eccleston, chief information officer for the New York Power Authority. “The real problem was that we didn’t have the infrastructure to satisfy the demands of the many stakeholders who needed information about our customers. We had to choose. Should we give them a one-time dump of a database knowing that it would grow stale and require a separate effort to maintain the information accuracy? Or should we program access into the source information at the risk of creating another interface that would have to be kept up?”
Streamlining business processes with SOA
With such unpromising alternatives, the NYPA turned to a solution which would provide a single source of information for billing and for customer information inquiries alike—a service oriented architecture (SOA). This business-centric IT architectural approach supports the integration of business as linked, repeatable business tasks or services.
“With SOA we could invest the time once, building a very small front end that represents looking up information from various systems and aggregating that information in a new way that provides better access to the information,” says Eccleston.
The NYPA decided to start service enabling its source data by streamlining its billing system, turning the four discrete systems into a single consistent environment. As a committed SAP shop, the NYPA’s goal was to integrate its SAP Billing, Customer Care and Services System and simplify the more than 120 interfaces used for customer billing.
The NYPA evaluated several options, including IBM, Tibco as well as a customized solution using SAP Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP).
“We brought in IBM to demonstrate their product offering and we were impressed with the flexibility of their toolkit,” says Edward Fisher, program manager. “The IBM product set is built on an open standard, which is a big benefit in extending the solution. Another advantage was the availability of IBM developers to assist us and apply best practices.”
Constructing a reusable framework
To build its SOA foundation, the NYPA chose IBM WebSphere Process Server, IBM WebSphere Message Broker and IBM WebSphere Adapter for SAP Software. These products are core to IBM’s Solution Architecture for Energy (SAFE), a solution driven, comprehensive SOA based enterprise framework that helps reduce cost and risk in the Energy and Utility industry. SAFE and SOA provide flexibility that protects a utility’s investment in their applications, systems and infrastructure.
“The IBM WebSphere Adapter for SAP allows us to work with the various interfaces that SAP provides,” says Eccleston. “We have interfaces that work as a one-way street, pushing data into SAP but returning no information about the success or failure of that particular transaction. In other cases we send in a transaction and the returned report contains a lot of great detail about its success or failure. To this point, we are using the IBM Process Server to actually review those results, to take certain corrective actions, to take other steps—either to rehabilitate the data or to alert someone that there is a problem with the data as well as what subsequent actions could be taken. This process is streamlined and efficient.”
WebSphere Message Broker is used to route and reformat messages, integrating with the target destinations. In this capacity, the solution provides a means for reuse of data and applications, embracing the use of open standards.
“One of the biggest advantages of the WebSphere environment is that it enables you to reuse what you’ve done,” says Fisher. “When you go about designing an application, in the back of your mind you’re always thinking‘ how can I design and publish it in a way that can be later reused not only for this interface, but potentially for other interfaces down the road?’ The WebSphere toolkit provides the answer.”
Faster development equals greater productivity
Now that the billing system is SOA-enabled, development is faster. “If a new request comes in to build an application, we have a reusable library that we turn to,” says Fisher. “So before we even get started, we are about 50 percent complete.”
“Reusability means that we develop in weeks rather than months,” adds Eccleston. “It’s a tremendous improvement in productivity.”
Easier access to information streamlines business processes
The SOA solution allows the NYPA to bill all of its customers within the same IT environment. This has brought a change to the way the organization conducts its business.
“SOA enables us to leverage our billing staff on all sides of the house using one set of business processes that are consistent,” says Eccleston. “We have just a few billing people handling all our functions with one system. This has freed up at least 15 full-time employees for more valuable tasks.” Additionally, now all of the NYPA’s data for reporting comes out of one repository, which supports its business warehouse, giving all its stakeholders a single view of the information.
“We have consolidated four systems into one system, standardized and improved the maintainability of our interfaces, freed staff time for more valuable work, and have one version of the truth which makes us more efficient,” says Eccleston. “IBM provided the software, implementation services, training and knowledge transfer to enable our staff to function on their own. They also provided best practices and partnered with us on how best to execute the strategy. I am very pleased with the level of effort and type of support that IBM was able to provide in this project.”
A foundation for the future
Looking to the future the NYPA sees IBM’s Smart SOA solution as a platform that can easily expand to integrate additional applications and systems. And one that can support advanced business process capabilities such as complex event handling and business monitoring.
As Dennis Eccleston puts it, “I think the Power Authority has great flexibility with this environment in that it can deal with all types of systems and data; whether it’s external to the company, whether it’s an Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server database, whether it’s delivered via an e-mail attachment or as an FTP file transfer. The environment is so flexible that we can have many different types of data sources, many different types of events that are triggering a series of activities, actions, data to be massaged, transformations, imports, exports, notifications. It’s just very, very flexible.”
Solution Components
~IBM WebSphere Process Server
~IBM WebSphere Message Broker
~IBM WebSphere Adapter for SAP Software
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit us at:
ibm.com/software/solutions/soa
ibm.com/websphere
For more information on the New York Power Authority, visit:
www.nypa.gov
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Software:
WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere Adapters, WebSphere Process Server
Legal Information
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2008 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, New York 10589 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America September 2008 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com and WebSphere are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol (® or ™), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml Other product, company or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. WSC14054-USEN-00