Creating Separate IT Ecosystem for Nordic Electricity Distributor

Success Story: Rebuilding the customer’s IT ecosystem with Microsoft technology stack

There are cases when different companies merge into one, such as one of our customers, an Irish state agency. Each company bears its own IT infrastructure with a myriad of their own systems, technologies, and processes. Bringing all this mess under one roof is a true challenge, and we will certainly share this success story with you in a short while. At the other hand, there are cases when a company has to split up, forming a number of new companies with independent infrastructures and systems. The demerger of a company is always a complex process where dividing IT infrastructure and assets may be the most challenging part.

Since 2016, Infopulse cooperates with a newborn company*, formed as a result of the business split up. Our team helps the company to set up its own independent Data Warehouse, which can meet all vital business needs.

Read on to learn how Infopulse developed a sophisticated solution within the complicated process of the business split up.

*NOTE: The customer’s name is protected by the NDA.

Case Background: a Leading Nordic Energy Distribution Company

Our client is one of the leading energy distribution operators in the Nordic region. The company owns regional and local power networks, which distribute electricity to more than 900,000 customers.

The company has a centuries-long history on the market, though being at-times a part of other well-known Nordic businesses. After the final split up from one of the leading energy providers in 2015, the client was in need of its own independent infrastructure.

Working on Client’s New IT Ecosystem

Infopulse had to build an independent and well-documented Data Warehouse, redevelop the Business Intelligence reporting system, connect new systems to the client’s existing IT infrastructure, and empower business-users with the generation of ad-hoc decision-making reports via self-service analytical tools.

The main part of the IT ecosystem had to be rebuilt using Microsoft technology stack while considering the former structure. The business division allowed developing new systems, as well as changing the cornerstone principles. Another equally important task was to automate all manual IT processes.

The main challenge was the versatility of the incoming data and documentation, which Infopulse had to properly organize and structure. As the process already started, we were receiving additional information on the go. Thus, priorities of tasks could change at any moment.

A Sophisticated BI Solution

Infopulse created a new Data Warehouse and ETL flow with Data Quality control that receives data from seven source systems. The newly created Data Warehouse complex has a split-level data processing. First, it acquires data processes and sorts information. Then it generates various analytical reports based on this data per users’ requests.

Additionally, new Data Warehouse collects all values from the measurement systems and fills them up with the price information, collected from the actual billing system. The results of these operations allow calculating the revenue from the last month, before the actual billing system does, and sending out the invoices.

While manual operations were mostly automated, we added an option to manually change data in the Data Warehouse to let the data stewards adjust the information in case of any inconsistencies and excluding access to the database.

During our work on the project, we discovered a huge amount of unused invalid data in the system. Thus, we offered and delivered implementation of the Data Quality Management to verify all data and send reports with this information to system managers for correction.

The Infopulse experts designed and implemented the customer’s solution based on the combination of the following technologies:

• MS SQL Server 2016
• Oracle
• Oracle ETL Tool
• SQL Server Integration Services 2016
• SQL Server Reporting Services 2016
• WhereScape RED
• PowerShell

Business Value and Further Steps

Infopulse has built a new independent and fully documented Data Warehouse and a flexible analytical platform for the mandatory reporting and for the better decision making. Our client received a system with more than seventy SSRS-based analytical reports in different functional areas for different business-users’ roles. Moreover, we helped to establish data quality control processes in the company.

Infopulse continues working with our client and recently received an additional task to develop a logging system to monitor users’ activities in the enterprise DWH. The solution that our team is currently implementing will allow Data Warehouse to collect stats about popular requests and build related reports.

There is also a plan to create Analysis Services cubes and implement MS Power BI Report Server as a fully functional reporting tool for the customer.

Overall, Infopulse established a productive partnership with the client, and our businesses are already reaping benefits from this cooperation: our client’s systems perform independently at full capacity, while we deepened our experience in developing advanced BI for the Electricity distribution domain.