This company is the largest water-only supplier in the UK and they are committed to delivering a high quality water service to all their customers. In various forms, they have been supplying water to the local community for more than 130 years.
They provide on average 900 million litres of water each day to a population of more than 3.6 million people in parts of Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Surrey, the London Boroughs of Harrow and Hillingdon and parts of the London Boroughs of Barnet, Brent, Ealing and Enfield. They also supply water to the Tendring peninsula in Essex and the Folkestone and Dover areas of Kent.
The Challenge
They were implementing a major new Works Management System and then were required by the regulator to implement the new Open Water program. The Open Water programme splits the wholesale and retail businesses, allowing client choice in water provision. They were early users of Oracle SOA Suite and were using a large global systems integrator to provide both development and support services. They were experiencing several issues around SOA and wondered if SOA Suite was the right solution to integrate these key enterprise systems together.
The Solution
SOA Review: Integrella offered to undertake a review and audit of SOA Suite to evaluate whether the platform was providing value for money and was a good fit to integrate these large enterprise systems effectively. Subsequently, several issues were found in the Oracle 11g implementation that Integrella were able to fix and provide a more reliable and performant service. These improvements have been maintained and further improved as the 11g on-premise system was upgraded to 12c running on an AWS Cloud service, stabilised and performance optimised.
As a result, the contract with the major SI was terminated and a new contract taken out with Integrella that covered several key areas.
Development: Integrella supplied three SOA Suite developers to speed up the integration of the Works Management Systems to other enterprise apps. We were then requested to take responsibility for the high-level design of Open Water and provide all the development resource to take it to UAT. We then combined the Works Management and Open Water systems into a combined delivery, meeting the Regulators target delivery date for an April 2017 go live.
Support: Integrella was asked to provide business hours and weekend break/fix support of SOA Suite and implement our remote proactive monitoring tool to alert us of issues before they became a crisis.
Centre of Excellence: Part of the contract was to help the company reach best practice by instituting a Centre of Excellence covering development standards, quality assurance processes and governance. Following an audit, recommendations were made regarding several governance and quality assurance issues and these changes are being implemented collaboratively with the AW IT team. Various Integrella artefacts are being tailored for use in the development process and the business as usual support teams. In particular, a major recommendation was to create a DevOps culture and process that could turn a 6-week elapsed time for new developments to reach production into days and create a continuous integration and continuous development regime.
Partnership: Integrella provides short term resources to fix problems and long term resources to undertake a complete project, working collaboratively with their own staff. They have benefited from the proactive nature of our can do attitude where we will point out ways that savings can be made and efficiencies gained irrespective of this reducing Integrella involvement.
About Integrella
Integrella is a specialist IT services company with extensive experience across UK sectors. Our services include consulting, development, delivery, support and resourcing. We deliver our solutions by partnering with top vendors in the industry.
The pressure is on every organisation to be more connected, more convenient, more compelling and more social. These needs drive digital transformation. Integrella can help you realise the potential in what you already have – and set you on the right digital track.