ZSE Case Study

eRespond Goes Live with ZSE in Slovakia

ZSE (Západoslovenská energetika a.s.) is the electricity distributor and supplier for Western Slovakia including the capital Bratislava. Part of the giant EON Group, ZSE faced the challenges of future electricity deregulation in their Slovakian marketplace. In common with many other European utilities ZSE was separated into 2 companies a regulated distributor (ZSE Distribucia) and an unregulated commercial energy supplier (ZSE Energia). As part of a major technology upgrade involving SAP, eRespond was chosen as the Outage Management System (OMS) module within the new system landscape.

 

This was partly driven by eRespond’s status as the only SAP-certified and ‘Powered by Netweaver’ OMS in the market, but also because of:

• The state of the art technology used to provide real benefits in event identification and localisation, customer service and contribution to overall system reliability targets

• The experience of LeT Systems in the highly regulated UK market and the range of functionality and tools available in eRespond to support the increased regulatory reporting requirements

• Functional ‘richness’ to meet requirements with ‘no customisation’.

• The range of standard interface options available to meet the integration requirements of the overall solution.

The implementation of eRespond in ZSE with our partners Siemens, is the first step in a programme to standardise systems and applications across the EON Group’s Central European energy companies, distributed across, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria.

Utility Profile

Key Data:

c. 1M Properties/ Customers

Service Territory: c. 14900 km^2,, mixture of urban and rural environment

2700 km 110kV lines, 12800km 22kV lines, and 19700km 400/250V

Mixture of Mesh, Radial, and Loop networks

Industries:

Electricity

Region:

Western Slovakia

Goals:

• Transform ZSE to become a benchmark European utility

• Increase efficiency, reduce duplicate work, simplify regulatory reporting

• Provide a ‘blueprint’ for system landscape to be ‘rolled out’ across other EON sites.

Challenge:

• 12 month implementation timescale

• Level of integration required between eRespond, SAP modules, and legacy applications combining multiple integration technologies

• Data held in diverse systems needed to be tied together to ensure that there was a coherent data model with single data master identified for each key data object

• Fully Slovak language version of eRespond implemented.

Products Bought:

eRespond Event Management, Network, Customer, Troublecall, and Event Reporting modules. .

Benefits:

• Improved event identification and localisation leading to reduced work duplication

• Improved customer feedback and hence improved customer experience

• More accurate CML (customer minutes lost) calculations, and reduced effort in post-event data collection

• Improved situational awareness for dispatchers via eRespond screens and alerts

Implementation

Timescale:

12 months to Go-Live.

Integration:

eRespond is at the hub of the new system landscape with:

• the ‘as-built’ or ‘normal’ network model refreshed on a daily basis via updates from the GIS system,

• real-time updates from the SCADA system, refreshing the ‘current’ network status, and updating planned switching actions

• a ‘screen pop’ style interface from SAP CRM to eRespond providing outage feedback for call agents

• New SAP orders created and updated directly triggered from eRespond events, and feedback from the field passing in the other direction to provide progress updates to the dispatchers and call agents.

Network Model:

ZSE have an extensive mature network model from 110kV Very High Voltage, through 22kV MV, to 400/250 V Low Voltage, with around 97% Customer to Network Link (CNL). The network model is mixture of complex mesh networks in the urban Bratislava area and radial networks in the suburban and rural regions. The complete Network model was implemented in eRespond 110Kv to meter level, with the normal network updated on a nightly basis, and real-time updates to the current network configuration being fed to eRespond via the SCADA interface.

Business Benefits

In eRespond, ZSE found a system that could unlock key benefits across their distribution organisation, not just in their central control room fault management and dispatching area area but across their customer contact, management/regulatory reportings, and asset management teams.

• Customer Relationship Benefits: Improved and more timely feedback to customers both for planned and reactive events – improving customer satisfaction scores and first time call resolution statistics.

• Event Management Benefits: Significantly enhanced ‘situational awareness’ for supervisors in the control room using the eRespond Event Management screens and functions (and the supporting integration to SAP ECC and CRM) as a ‘one stop shop’ for all that is happening on an event. Allowing operators to become more supervisory using knowledge rather than ‘fighting’ the data.

• Event identification and Localisation Benefits: Using eRespond’s automatic identification and localisation algorithms, the root fault locations is quickly identified, resulting in quicker and more accurate dispatch times - with a subsequent reduction in duplicate work creation.

• Reporting Benefits: A large suite of more than 60 ‘standard’ reports provides information collated and available via a few mouse clicks at any time – no more need to wait for the weekly or monthly consolidation. Allows more time for analysis of the data and resulting in improved business processes

Objectives Fulfilled

The ZSE eRespond implementation was completed successfully and is now a key element in the ‘blueprint’ system landscape for EON, ready for rollout to neighbouring EON utilities in the near future. The project played a key role in helping ZSE modernise their business processes and increase efficiency with a full CRM to mobile workforce management solution. With increased productivity across the board from call take, event management, work management and reporting it is anticipated that return on investment will be swift.

With eRespond onboard ZSE is well on its way to being recognised as a world class utility – and a standard bearer for the wider EON Group.

 

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