EPN, LPN and SEEBOARD Networks came together in 2002 under the aegis of EDF Energy Networks. EDF Energy is the largest electricity distribution network owner in the UK, covering the whole of London, the East and South East of England, and serving over a quarter of the UK's population.
As part of the merger, the new EDF Energy Networks company consolidated its billing services and sought to standardise their business systems. After a review of their combined legacy business systems EDF Energy concluded that the SciSys systems were the most flexible and cost-effective Distribution Use of System (DUoS) Billing Systems. EDF Energy commissioned SciSys to develop an enhanced application-suite to cover both Half-hourly Site Specific and Supercustomer DUoS billing for the combined network.
SciSys's approach was to develop a detailed business behaviour model for the new Half Hourly and Supercustomer DUoS billing systems. SciSys then proceeded to design, develop and support the resulting centralised Half Hourly DUoS and Super Customer systems. In addition, SciSys supplied data migration services to transfer data from existing systems.
Distribution Use of System Billing Systems
Distribution Use of System (DUoS) charges are levied by host distribution companies to electricity supply companies to cover the cost of distributing electricity to their customers.
Half-hourly DUoS Billing systems calculate site specific bills for large organisations where their energy consumption is significant on a half-hourly basis.
Supercustomer DUoS Billing calculates energy bills for the suppliers of domestic and other low volume customers
The main benefits of this state-of-the-art SciSys solution are:
- A more flexible responsive system for billing the three Distribution Network Operators clients (including export site billing).
- Its high level of automation combined with ease of use means fewer staff are required to run the billing operation
- Lower support & maintenance charges
- Overall cost of billing is significantly reduced
- More timely business information to help control business issues
Half-hourly DUoS Billing
Half-hourly DUoS Billing is a specialist energy billing system designed to cost the 'use of system' charges from high volume consumers' meter readings and advances.
It calculates site specific bills using complex half-hourly tariffs specific to each Distribution Network Operator (DNO). The system is designed to be a highly automated, high performance server based bill calculator.
The internal architecture supports the automated recalculation of bills in response to the revision of consumption data or of registration details.
Registration details are maintained using an automated link to the Meter Point Registration System.
Changes to the registration details during the summer period often produce 'BST anomalies' which result in partial and/or duplicate data. The system, using business rules, identifies these occurrences and correctly apportions the units ensuring accurate billing.
Supercustomer DUoS Billing
Supercustomer DUoS Billing calculates charges on the use of the distribution network by a suppliers domestic customers. From this it generates a group bill for each supplier active in the distribution area.
It does this using consumption information provided by the central systems and the Distribution Network Operators own published tariffs.
Technologies
Identifying the business needs in terms that were complete, accurate and detailed was achieved through the use of a behaviour model. This model illustrated the behaviour of the system for all the business events as Unified Modelling Language (UML) notation activity diagrams using simple, easy to understand steps. This model then superseded the requirements catalogue as the commercial baseline and as a basis for design, testing and acceptance.
Both Billing systems use a Client Server architecture with the client deployed using Citrix. The core of the system is based on Oracle 9i and C code modules with embedded SQL. The Client services are written in Visual Basic.
