Outsourced IT Services: Database Management
Elexon
Brief
Provide support, maintenance and development services for the Performance Assurance and Monitoring Service (PARMS).
Business Case
Elexon (formerly The Electricity Pool) manages the electricity trading arrangements in England and Wales. Elexon procures, manages and operates services and systems, which enable the balancing and imbalance settlement of the wholesale electricity market and retail competition in electricity supply.
The PARMS system processes large amounts of data from the electricity suppliers and generates detailed and complex reports which define the performance-based charges due from the suppliers.
The system was originally written by Cap Gemini. To operate it, Elexon needed a supplier who could provide a cost-effective, high quality support and enhancement resource. The system is business critical so they required a consistent and reliable service, with the flexibility to cope with peaks and troughs.
Implementation
The PARMS system is large and complex so we spent some time at the start familiarising ourselves with it and setting up a development environment at our offices.
We respond to help desk calls and requests for enhancements, according to a Service Level Agreement. As well as fixing bugs, we have carried out a substantial amount of development and enhancement work. The database is very large (over 4Gbyte) and so performance is an issue - we improved the speed with which the key reports were generated by an order of magnitude.
Benefits
We respond quickly to requests for work and provide resources as required, without the overhead of dedicated full-time staff. All the work that we do is fully documented and tested. Elexon therefore have complete peace of mind with regard to a key business system. |