Published on 17 Mar 2008
Validated on 18 Dec 2012
"We can manage the data we already have and go through SOA and provide that information across multiple disciplines without the reinvestment in some of these complex and expensive systems. " - Gary D. Cripps, Chief Financial Officer
Customer:
Delaware Electric Cooperative
Industry:
Energy & Utilities
Deployment country:
United States
Solution:
Enabling Business Flexibility, Service Oriented Architecture
Overview
Delaware Electric Cooperative is a distribution electric utility which serves approximately 80,000 members. It doesn't generate electricity but it provides the service in getting it to the meter.
Business need:
Delaware Electric Cooperative has to be able to adapt its delivery on a moment’s notice.
Solution:
SOA provides Delaware Electric Cooperative with a medium to tie its technology with its strategic plans as a business.
Benefits:
Delaware Electric Cooperative can manage the data it already has and goes through SOA and provides that information across multiple disciplines without the reinvestment in some of these complex and expensive systems.
Video
Delaware Electric Cooperative is a distribution electric utility which serves approximately 80,000 members. It doesn't generate electricity but it provides the service in getting it to the meter.
Video Transcript
BM SOA Customer Reference
Delaware Electric Cooperative
Gary D. Cripps, Chief Financial Officer
Delaware Electric Cooperative is a distribution electric utility. We serve approximately 80,000 members. We don't generate electricity but we provide the service in getting it to the meter.
We have to be able to adapt our delivery on a moment’s notice… So many of our engineering applications in particular are changing as technology changes as we view how we are going to deliver our services to the customer.
The diversity of engineering applications with web applications, with business applications, really that mixed cocktail and we had to look at our business entirely different.
SOA provides a medium to really tie our technology with our strategic plans as a business.
What SOA is allowing me to do is to look at the processes, look at the changes that I need to make…
Leverage the investments that we have made in the past and carry that forward, it's a good thing.
We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. …we can manage the data we already have and go through SOA and provide that information across multiple disciplines without the reinvestment in some of these complex and expensive systems.
The improvements in work management can be measured quite simply in things like call center performance and the ability to take engineering applications as diverse as where our infrastructure is buried on a property somewhere in Southern Delaware, to when someone is going to go out and locate where it is so you can dig a hole to put your fence. We now have call center capabilities that can track that work, track that performance and tell you, yes sir, I can have that for you today by 3 pm … it just makes everybody happy.
IBM brought to Delaware Electric Cooperative a vision, a vision of SOA.
They not only had the vision but they had the capable staff to help me put that vision into a business plan, they were able to assist me in identifying my current architecture the way that it looks and looking at the way that I wanted it to be.
They were able to help me to put it in business terms so that not only could I get support from my IT professionals, but I could get support at the executive level in the boardroom, and that’s critical in any type of major platform change that you do in the organization
The real value that we find in SOA is the opportunities that we have going forward where we can take our technology to the consumer
We are working on automated meters, we now have meters on homes that are quite intelligent, they can tell us the consumption patterns, they can tell us peaks, they can tell us load shapes on that particular property.
We can bring the consumer in with us and have them as an active participant in the management of their account with Delaware Electric. That offers an opportunity that we could talk financial metrics, we could talk about return on investment, but at the end of the day my consumer loves Delaware Electric, and there is a value on that that’s hard to put a dollar sign on.