CenterPoint Energy isn’t accustomed to being an early adopter of new technologies. But when the Texas Legislature voted to deregulate the state’s electric industry, the Houston electric utility faced big changes to its operating model – changes that exponentially increased the integration demands on CenterPoint’s IT systems.
Today, CenterPoint does business in the deregulated energy market not as an old-school utility company with monolithic systems, but as a nimble energy-delivery company with a composite application framework that gives company management customized diagnostic dashboards for keeping tabs on everything from individual transactions to overall business performance.
Before deregulation took effect in 2002, CenterPoint’s electric utility business did it all – it generated power, sold and delivered power to customers, and collected payments. With deregulation, its focus shifted to electricity transmission and distribution, while competing providers sell the electricity to consumers.
“The law said that the regulated utility company could no longer sell electricity. Our only function would be the transmission and distribution of electricity,” says Mary Rich, IT manager of the $17 billion company, which today provides electric and natural gas delivery. That distinction triggered massive integration challenges because CenterPoint now has to coordinate with dozens of market participants such as other electric companies, as well as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which administers the state’s power grid.
“When we did it all in-house, a customer would call the electric company and tell us they needed their electricity turned on. Customer service would ask several questions and enter the data into a single system. That same mainframe system that set you up would produce your bills, track and handle service requests, and even provide a feed to the outage system,” Rich says. Things aren’t nearly so simple anymore. “Now that same transaction could go through 50 system processes in four separate companies before the order is actually completed. It’s now very complex,” Rich says.
CenterPoint initially selected software from SeeBeyond to create an integration hub between its current legacy systems, the retailers’ systems and ERCOT. The SeeBeyond technology handles the necessary data translation, validation, transfer and reporting. “The project was to get into the deregulated market and get the transactions in and out the door,” Rich recalls.
The success of that project led to a bigger role for the SeeBeyond software, which today is the company’s technology standard for integration projects.
In January of this year, CenterPoint rolled out Version 5.0 of SeeBeyond’s Integrated Composite Application Network (ICAN) suite. The suite consists of multiple products, including eGate Integrator, which tackles application connectivity and data transformation; eBAM Studio, which generates business activity monitoring (BAM) applications for tracking key metrics; and eVision Studio for creating composite Web applications. This year the company is looking at implementing eInsight Business Process Manager, which handles the orchestration of multi-system business processes.
With Version 5.0, CenterPoint is taking steps to migrate to a service-oriented architecture that will support a system of composite applications created from current legacy applications. The goal is to shift away from traditional monolithic application development methods and toward a more flexible, process-based model.
With real-time analytics and performance management capabilities, the system lets end users see what’s going on and monitor transactions from start to finish via a Web interface. For example, users in SeeBeyond’s revenue, billing and credit departments can see the number of transactions received, compare current levels to historic figures, and see how many transactions have been processed, Rich says.
Users also can go a step further and access individual transactions. “They can get down all the way into a transaction and fix it if there’s a functional error, or reroute it, or do a lot of other things down at the single-transaction level,” Rich says.
By giving end users greater visibility into transactions – as well as control over those transactions – it cuts down on the amount of manual effort required, Rich says. In the past, identifying and resolving individual transaction errors was a time-consuming chore for end users and IT staff. If a transaction error occurred, someone had to query CenterPoint’s databases to extract transaction data and dig through it to find the error’s source, and then contact the IT team to make the appropriate change in the database directory.
There was a lot of e-mail back and forth between IT and users, Rich says. With the SeeBeyond technology, end users can make corrections without requiring IT assistance.
Real-time analytic capabilities help CenterPoint spot and resolve transaction problems much more quickly, which makes business users more proactive than reactive, Rich says. That’s important with a transaction processing network the size of CenterPoint’s. “We process 500,000 transactions a day. Just a 1% error is an unmanageable figure of errors,” Rich says.
One advantage of using a common platform for integration and process monitoring is that IT staff have honed their SeeBeyond expertise. “When a problem is presented to us, we can figure out how to get it resolved in SeeBeyond,” Rich says. “It cuts down on support personnel, it makes operating costs a lot cheaper, and it allows us to utilize the SeeBeyond tools to their fullest extent.”
