British Energy

Our work for British Energy has delivered an integrated suite of applications covering many aspects of the asset investment and equipment manangement processes.

The Investment Management module was developed intensively and iteratively in order to deliver an urgently needed system to plan and record asset investment.  This was required for the use of a newly-restructured business function and to support a business process that was still being defined.  The flexibility and productivity of the kinodb development environment meant that what would in other circumstances have been impossible was instead turned into an advantage.  As changes to the business process were reflected in the implemented application in days rather than weeks, users were able to refine the operation of the process and its support by the system as a part of the development of the process itself.  The result was a process that was known to work well, and an application that supported it fully on day one of live operation.

British Energy have made various significant changes to the investment process in the succeeding years - on each change we have been able to make the modifications required to support the new process without delaying its implementation.  The most significant of these changes was to change to a risk-based assessment of each investment; this entailed the implementation of an entirely new Risk Register that allows any one of the company's 7,500 employees to record risks for subsequent assessment, scoring and escalation.

Interfaces are provided from the financial accounting and maintenance management systems to enable visibility of all relevant asset information at a central point.

All of these applications are implemented within a single application repository, enabling tight integration between the different functional areas - for instance, an investment planner can easily view the performance history of a system for which investment is planned, and a system health engineer can view pending and historical investments.

All 7,500 British Energy staff can access the Risk Reporting module; there are around 350 users of the Risk Assessment, Investment Programming and FLAIR functions.

Interfaces are provided from the financial accounting and maintenance management systems to enable visibility of all relevant asset information at a central point.

• Risk Reporting - all British Energy employees have the ability to enter details of operational and other risks.

• Risk Assessment and Management - reported risks are assessed and scored. The application manages the assessment, escalation and cost implications of reported risks

• Investment Programming - investments across the enterprise are recorded within the application, which is used to assess the impact (in terms of cost, risk, benefit realisation date and potential operational impact) of changes to the investment programme. The application manages multiple phases of the investment assessment, approval and sanction process

• Fleet Asset Information Register (FLAIR) - information from a variety of external sources is aggregated and scored within the application to provide detailed information on asset reliability, system health assessments, attribution of losses resulting from plant failure and so on. This module supports and provides an audit trail for a number of formal assessment processes.

"The Fleet Asset Information Register (FLAIR) is an outstanding tool for knowledge management providing on-line access to a broad range of data across the fleet. This is markedly superior to comparable systems seen by the team elsewhere.  FLAIR uses data maintained by the data owners so they are always up to date.  FLAIR also uses data extracted from [British Energy's maintenance management system].  FLAIR provides links to company risk log and investment management system. It also captures walk down observations and system action plans."

International Atomic Energy Agency
- report on British Energy's Equipment Reliability process