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Integration solution delivers business agility

In an industry as fast-moving and demanding as utilities, businesses need to be able to respond with lightening speed to changes in markets and customer demand. For many utility companies, the ability to act quickly is hampered by cumbersome, disparate legacy systems. But at this major electricity company, an integration solution provided by Optimation has delivered the agility and flexibility to action business change requests in as little as two hours.

Major electricity company

Utilities: Application development, Consulting

Like many similar businesses, this electricity company was struggling to effectively leverage its numerous core business applications, which reside on disparate legacy systems. Managers needed the right information at the right time to be able to operate effectively under pressure, make fast but accurate decisions, and roll out new business solutions in response to fast-changing market dynamics.

The answer lay in implementing a web-services based middleware infrastructure that supports communication and interaction between many disparate applications across a distributed enterprise environment.

We delivered:

  • Design and implementation of a web-services capable Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) environment to enable application and business process integration
  • Implementation of application frameworks to maximise re-use and respond rapidly to business needs
  • Consultancy on architecture and infrastructure to optimise performance

Business benefits and outcomes:

  • Rapid response to changes in markets and customer demand
  • Business agility enabled by integration of disparate legacy applications
  • Maximised returns from existing systems
  • Prompt rollout of new business solutions
  • Implementation and maintenance costs reduced by up to 66%
  • Simple change requests now achieved in just two hours' runtime
  • Accurate benchmarking of performance as a valuable input to the IT Governance framework

Why Optimation?

Optimation was called in because of its proven expertise in completing similar complex enterprise integrations for other organisations. The company asked us to design and deliver a proof-of-concept web-services capable integration platform. When this proved successful, we went on to build and deliver the full production environment.

How we did it

Optimation's solution is based on an Enterprise System Bus (ESB). This solution provides a load balanced, high availability platform that facilitates business function and process integration needs.

To ensure the ESB implementation could react quickly when a business need arose, Optimation also implemented several application frameworks including the Common Services Framework and the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Framework. The Common Services Framework allows integration projects to leverage pre-built functionality, maximising re-use and standardising the business process and service common behaviour on the ESB. The ETL Framework provides a highly configurable ETL tool which resides on the ESB. It meets the immediate business data loading needs and allows the business to customise the loading process with minimum implementation effort.

Want to know more? Talk to our team.