Business Need:
Our Utility client currently serves 1.1 million electric customers and over 900,000 natural gas customers.
Originally, they were using the two separate applications for serving their commercial/industrial customers. The purpose of one application was to do the cost and saving analysis for energy and gas usage. The other one was created to provide compliance with the City of Seattle benchmarking mandate to obtain up to 24 months (about 2 years) of monthly usage and cost data, with the option to upload to/sync with a third-party account if desired or applicable.
Both applications have never fully delivered on their original design specifications, resulting in diminishing functionality; unreliable data access, completeness, and timeliness; and several previously automated processes which were accomplished manually. Original design flaws, never resolving bugs, and performance deficiencies have rendered both products only semi-useful, resulting in an increasingly poor customer experience.
Both products were near to the end of life and were due for replacement. The City of Seattle benchmarking mandate model was set to be implemented statewide by Nov 2020, which added additional urgency for the replacement of current applications.
Challenge:
- Integration with existing systems and new vendor solution
- Transition of two applications design and functionality into one application
- Creating APIs and defining properties of Swagger UI for vendor solution
- Data migration from current systems to the new vendor system
- Data and System Security
Our Solution:
Unification of both apps’ functionality into a specific product was the next logical evolution. Cimplesoft collaborated with client, OCM team, vendor and worked on collecting requirements and documenting RFI and RFP, creating BA Strategy and Approach documentation, and successfully delivered a new Vendor System.
The process involved requirement elicitation, need assessment, collaboration with the business, technical team, OCM team, Security and Vendor, creating APIs, defining properties of Swagger UI, creating prototypes and UX design with vendor.
Outcome/Benefits:
The implementation of the new system was recommended where a wide range of customers were able to use the functionalities of two old applications into one new application that was more effective and efficient.
Technology:
Tools that were used for this project: SAP, Cassandra, Hana, Microsoft SQL Server, Amazon’s S3 Storage, Azure DevOps, SharePoint, Visual Studio, OpenText, Swagger UI, OKTA, EnergyCAP.
