St Clements SONET

St Clements and Parity: meeting the IT needs of the UK electricity industry

St Clements, the organisation that develops specialist software for the UK’s electricity suppliers and distributors, was faced with a significant crossroads for one of its key systems in early 2004.

The IT systems used for validating wholesale electricity purchases by nPower, Scottish Power, Scottish and Southern and EDF, four of the UK’s largest energy suppliers, were based on hardware and software that was no longer fully supported. To continue using those systems would have been an increasing business risk for the energy companies.

In addition, the software had evolved along with the electricity industry since 1990 and, although robust and operational, had become slightly tangential to the best-practice business processes that the companies wished to operate. The system was showing the first signs of moving from being a supporting tool to becoming a drag on process re-design and efficiency.

St Clements identified this timely coincidence of needs and recognised that sufficient business case could be made (despite the multi-million pound price-tag of the work) to radically re-develop the software. This would provide the energy companies with the opportunity to benefit from the latest intuitive technology environments. and provide a new enabler for innovation in business process design.

St Clements selected Parity, the IT services provider, to help it with this vital project to re-design and implement this key system.

Parity was initially invited to sit on a number of working groups to devise a common and consistent approach for all the companies involved and to plan and support the migration process.

Chris Wright, chief executive at St Clements, said:

Having completed the Requirements Analysis and Functional Design stage, St Clements chose Parity to design and build the new system (named SONET), using Oracle 9i, Forms 9i and Reports 9i. As well as software construction, the project required migration of significant volumes of data from the old system (based on DEC Alpha machines running VMS) to the new IBM P-series AIX environment.

The system went through a rigorous testing process (planned in three discrete sessions) once it had been designed and built, with the development stage of the project taking 14 months in total. The end result was a highly comprehensive and detailed system that is proving very stable.

During the writing and testing of the system, Parity pushed Oracle’s 9i technology to the limits, and worked with Oracle to monitor the performance of its products. The substantial data migration phase was resourced and supported from Parity’s Antrim office, using remote connections to the energy companies’ databases when required.

Parity then helped implement the new system, migrating the existing data from the four energy supply companies into the new database. Large amounts of data, 750 Gigabytes in total (6.8 billion rows of information), needed to be transferred – each company typically had four to six source databases that needed to be rationalised to the single combined database as part of the new SONET system.

Data had to be held safely and securely whilst it was categorised as ‘on-line’ (mission-critical), ‘near-line’ (needing to be stored for legal, business or other reporting needs) or ‘archive’ (data that was not needed by the business processes to be implemented). It then had to be migrated with as little disruption to the business as possible.

Parity’s consultants also provided training for users on the new system. Database operators were given in-depth technical courses on both the database itself and relevant aspects of the migration. A workshop was also conducted for all end-users to get to grips with the new methods of getting from A to Z that the system presented.

Heather Moore, managing director at Parity, said:

The project was a daunting challenge, but with Parity’s help has now come to fruition, with all the suppliers’ systems now live and fully operational.

St Clements and the energy suppliers have seen significant benefits: the database is now operating as a corporate resource for much of the settlements-related information and SONET is steadily gaining a reputation to rival the system it replaced.