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Enterprise-class Solution for Electricity Suppliers with Ambition

The retail electricity supply market is process intensive and requires IT solutions that can support substantial multiple terabyte size databases, large user communities and a narrow monthly bill production window.

The half hourly market sector requires electricity retailers to have access to accurate and timely data to a half hourly granularity. This imposes significant strain on systems that need to be designed with this purpose in mind.

The ERS software has been designed to be highly scalable with the ability to support large data volumes in a timely and cost efficient manner.

Avoiding barriers to successful market entry

The Big 6 electricity retailers have invested tens of millions of pounds in IT solutions that scale. This investment coupled with the economies of scale derived from large customer numbers delivers a low cost to serve per customer. New market entrants can be disadvantaged on cost to serve if their selected IT solution fails to deliver automated processing and scalability.

In fact a large number of new market entrants have failed due to inability of their selected IT solution to keep pace with growth and enable low cost to serve.

EDW works with time-tested technology

ERS uses nothing but time-tested technology which makes our system exceptionally reliable. ERS delivers high performance software using:

Oracle databases
JAVA development tools
Linux operating systems
Web services running on Tomcat and Apache.

Best of Breed Development Toolset

The EDW development team utilise a range of best of breed development tools to support the development process in order to maximise the teams productivity and the quality of solution deliverables.

ERS Development Tool Set

The ERS platform is built on EDW’s n-tiered scalable technology architecture. It offers super-fast processing to support NHH & HH business processes delivering the highest level of performance to optimise your business and your bottom line.

Tier 1 – Presentation Layer

This layer is responsible for displaying ERS user interfaces. The ERS Java smart client is downloaded to each user’s workstation, deployed by way of Java Web Start, providing a flexible and robust deployment solution to deliver automated updates.

Tier 2 – Application (Business) Layer

Responsible for accessing the data tier to retrieve, modify and delete data and send the results to the presentation tier. This layer is also responsible for processing the data retrieved and sent to the presentation layer.

Application servers deployed in this layer enable clusters of computing engines to be utilised as “workflow” engines for various tasks. These engines can be allocated over an unlimited number of physical servers and tuned as computational loads change for different tasks.

ERS workflow engines process tasks asynchronously in the background ensuring that users always experience great on-line performance. Large batch jobs are avoided by breaking work down to supply level processes where possible and performing work proactively avoiding processing bottlenecks.

Tier 3 – Database Layer

f On the third tier is Oracle, which provides a highly scalable database and computing layer using Oracle's RAC technology designed to store, retrieve, and update data as quickly and efficiently as possible.

In order to maximise performance ERS operates two database instances:

Pricing (all pricing and quoting related data)
Production (all other data).

ERS in conjunction with Oracle technology addresses such compelling infrastructure needs as:

Data management scalability and the ability to deliver a consistent performance, even at very large data volumes
High availability
Security of both data and user access throughout the data collection and processing cycles ensuring customer data remains confidential.