After the purchase of East Midlands Electricity by Powergen, de-regulation and the introduction of competition in the utilities industry meant Powergen had to sell the Metering business of East Midlands Electricity

Our consultants worked with the IT Manager for Metering services, to help form an IT department to separate the IT systems from East Midlands Electricity and run them independently so that the division could be successfully sold off. Their remit was to have adequately qualified UNIX administrators and database administrators to support and eventually migrate 60% of the managed data East Midlands Electricity had as part of the 1998 deregulation program.

The systems were all Oracle based and ran on HP and Solaris systems, using a mixture of local disks and A7000 mirrored storage. In total they had to take over the management of 3Tb of data used by up to 40 different databases and 320 users.

This was managed successfully and then successfully planned the migration of required hardware to purpose built offices, and at the same time carry out a major migration of systems from HP and SUN to SUN-E10K, as well as Oracle7 to Oracle8. Again this was successfully carried out with very little disruption to the users. The second major focus was to introduce business IT applications, such as finance and HR, to replace the Powergen corporate systems.

The project was completed under budget, with no unplanned disruption to “business as usual” operations and the entire project, titled “Preparing to Compete”, resulted in EME Metering winning the Utility Week ‘IT Initiative of the Year Award 2000’