SAP HANA Innovation Award 2014
Project Name: Data Intelligence Program - SAP HANA
Description:
AGL launched SAP’s HANA in-memory computing technology to successfully deliver high performance analytics and reporting capabilities to support key AGL business operations.
The program is a result of AGL’s continued focus in bringing innovation into the marketplace, based on leading edge technology from SAP.
Project Contact Details
Contact Person: | Darrel Egan | Angela Catt | Babu Murugesan |
Role: | Program Director | Head of Commercial Operations | Project Manager |
Email: | |||
Street: | 120 Spencer St | ||
Post-code: | 3000 | ||
City: | Melbourne | ||
Country: | Australia | ||
Phone: | 0410 471 030 | 0412 691 718 | 0449611139 |
Implementation Partner Details
Implementation Partner Details:
Partner Implemented
Implementer Name:
Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS)
Implementer Contact: Babu Murugesan
Implementer Title: Project Manager
Project Details
Implemented Solution: SAP HANA
Go live date: 30th May 2013
The main reasons that AGL selected SAP are:
Estimated number of SAP users:
Professional: Analyst & Call Center
HANA has been released to 60 business users and 900 plus call center users.
Total Project Budget: $16.85M
Implementation Overview
Business Issue:
The Electricity Industry in Australia embarked on a major change primarily due to the rollout of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) followed by implementation of the National Smart Metering Standards. This resulted in the rollout of the smart meters replacing the existing basic meters in the state of Victoria.
AGL, like most utility companies has a high dependency on quality and timely information to be delivered, distributed and processed by its key information systems. The operational performance, availability and integrity of these information systems are vital in ensuring continued commercial viability of AGL. With all the opportunities and benefits Smart Grids and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) provides, it also comes at a significant cost and introduces substantial risk as well; the most critical of these risks is the impact of managing large data volume. It is important to note that over 95% of AGL’s customer base had basic meters i.e. meters that are manually read or estimated every quarter; with AMI, these customer meters will be automatically read every 30 minutes and the meter reads transmitted daily. This will result to 17,520 reads per year and 4,400 times more data to store and process.
In addition, other time-series data needs to be captured so the processing impact will be much higher than just the customer consumption readings. It is imperative that a scalable and sustainable IT environment be provided to support AGL’s business operations.
Therefore, the business focus was to build a high performance analytics and reporting tool capable of handling this huge volume of incoming reads whilst also providing the following:
Project Justification:
AGL’s core business processes and supporting IT systems had to be enhanced to support and comply with these new regulatory/Industry standards, rules and procedures to sustain the core business and remain competitive in the market place.
AGL being one of the early adopters of SAP HANA, now has the ability to efficiently perform accurate load forecasting, predictive analysis on smart meter data and customer’s consumption pattern (profiling and segmentation) to come up with better insight into customer’s consumption behavior in order to provide most appropriate product offers. The customer profiling and segmentation features have been achieved using the SAP BI reporting suite.
Implementation Overview - Project Scope
The capabilities of SAP HANA has been utilised to import, validate, cleanse and manage this huge tsunami of reads in one central data store. HANA has also replaced the legacy application’s functionalities and provides rich, high performing analytics and reporting capabilities to support key AGL business operations, for example:
Apart from the meter reads, SAP HANA also stores the following essential data and process entities:
TCS as the strategic IT partner of AGL was engaged to implement SAP HANA (High Performance Analytical Appliance) solution along with Data Services and SAP BI tools through the Data Intelligence (DI) program for managing the smart meter growth in an efficient way and build an efficient reporting solution.
Resources, Timeline, Architecture
The Data Intelligence (DI) program involved TCS as the System Integrator to deliver end-to-end solution and SAP as the product support lead. Resources were based in Melbourne (Australia) and Kolkata (India) with the project operating from 2 separate locations, involving a peak team size of 65.
The DI program included 6 streams of work (Core Development, People Change Management, Risks & Dependencies, Technical Architecture, Testing, deployment and decommissioning).
The DI Program ran from October 2011 to June 2013 with SAP Australia being an integral part of the DI program Governance.
The SAP HANA system has been integrated with other SAP products like SAP Data Services, SAP BOBJ/BI, and SAP BW & Solution Manager.
As part of this implementation, there were technical challenges such as dealing with high volume of data and transactions. Also, as the product was going through a maturity life-cycle the project team had to retrofit several product versions during the course of the project. These were efficiently managed through thorough management and architectural governance throughout the duration of the program.
Project Execution
Project approach involved the completion of the Proof of Technology to agree solution design and to confirm the project delivery cost. A successful project go-live in May 2013 was achieved.
AGL and TCS have been highly innovative by introducing and utilising AGILE methodology for effective project management delivering 94 user stories to the business. The AGILE delivery methodology was used by releasing the primary and secondary business features under the SCRUM framework. This framework was driven by the Scrum Master and the Product Owner. Not only did this ensure that the business expectations were captured and delivered, but also made sure that the project team worked as a coherent unit to deliver the expected outcome.
The project was a perfect example of “One Team” culture where all partners and AGL worked as a unit even under extreme pressure to deliver. AGL, TCS and SAP were completely aligned in various decisions throughout the duration of the program. The entire team blended well pertaining to their roles. The team deployed 15 sprints into the production environment using the SCRUM framework.
A Project Management Office (PMO) was created within the project to manage risks, issues, dependencies, and schedule as well as a weekly critical path analysis.
Based on the forecast, TCS also delivered a remediation initiative to ensure an optimal memory usage in HANA.
Change Management was an integral and key element of the program as the project was one of the largest cross divisional change program implemented by AGL.
Project Results and ROI
AGL was the first utility company in Australia to leverage in-memory analytics platform (SAP HANA).
Key Tangible Benefits (business value created)
Intangible Benefits
Trailblazer – The entry should explain how the solution uses SAP HANA to transform the business to empower the workforce and customers. These improvements should be substantial rather than incremental improvements
AGL being one of the early adopters of SAP HANA, now has the ability to efficiently perform predictive and prescriptive analysis on smart meter data and customer’s consumption pattern (profiling and segmentation) identifying insights into customer’s consumption behavior. Customers are empowered to view their own consumption patterns as well as AGL segmenting and understanding the customer better.
Also accurate and more timely demand forecasting results have been achieved for wholesale operations using HANA capabilities in conjunction with tools like MATLAB.
Please see attached document for further details
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