Summary:

IMS

datb's use of the kinodb application development tool has enabled British Energy to:

• Start to use new business processes within weeks of their definition, supported by a tailor-made Investment Management System (IMS).
• To refine those processes based on early experience of their use, and to enhance the supporting features of IMS without disruption to the system's users.
• To focus effort and expenditure with knowledge of the actual issues arising from the operation of the business process.

The net effect of this approach has been to allow the faster implementation of new business processes and hence the earlier realisation of the benefits that they were designed to deliver.

Business background:

Summary report (simulated data)

British Energy plc is the UK’s largest generator of electricity, delivering around 20% of the nation’s requirements.

Following the financial restructuring completed in January 2005, the company embarked on the Performance Improvement Programme (PiP) to enable British Energy’s Asset Planning and Improvement (API) function to sustain and improve the reliability of the company’s plant assets.

Challenge:

Detail programme report (simulated data)

"We have to be able to demonstrate that we can operate assets as well as anyone in the industry worldwide" – Bill Coley, British Energy Chief Executive

The Asset Planning and Improvement team will be responsible for directing £180 – 200M of expenditure in the year ending 31st March 2006.

Managing and controlling this level of expenditure presents significant difficulties.  PiP needed to develop new processes and management techniques in parallel with the operation of existing practices in order to start to deliver results with immediate effect.

Existing systems for the assessment of needs, planning of work and management of the ongoing work programme did not allow sufficient flexibility in terms of measuring benefits and allowing assessment of alternative investment strategies.  The volume of information was such that the existing management process – and specifically the need to provide an auditable process for individual investment decisions – was not considered to be sufficiently robust.

The imperatives were to:

• Deliver a justifiable and coherent five-year programme of investment
• Provide the API team with the tools to manage the ongoing programme

Solution:

Definition of need report (simulated data)

The need to start to deliver results almost immediately meant that the conventional approach of a long planning phase followed by a system implementation and integration lasting 1-2 years was simply not an option.

datb was asked to become involved on the basis of its expertise in the design and implementation of complex, intranet-deployed database applications in asset-based and other corporate environments.

At the time of datb’s initial involvement, extensive work had already been completed to revise and refine the Asset Investment Management process; our job was to take this conceptual process and provide system-based support to enable its operation across the organisation.

The delivered system had to be many things to many people:

• a database for station engineers to record individual engineering needs;
• an analysis tool for investment planners to assess the benefits and impacts of proposals;
• a plan-management system to construct and maintain the five-year programme of work, including the facility to perform ‘what-if’ analysis on variants of the programme; and
• a management tool to allow reporting of project actuals against the baselined plan.

A small team of users from British Energy was used to steer the initial development of the system, which was performed iteratively over a period of three months.  Workshops were used to gather and refine specific system requirements to allow it to fully support the business process.

During these workshops, the evolving system was used as the means by which problems and opportunities were discovered and resolved.  At all times the users could see the effect of the changes that they had specified, allowing successive refinement of the system and the elimination of any unwelcome surprises when the system entered operation.

How we did it:

Work item form (simulated data)

datb started work on the Investment Management System (IMS) during April 2005.

Within ten days, the bones of the system (not a prototype or mock-up) were being used to aid the process of refining requirements and specific functionality.

The initial implementation of IMS went live on the 1st June 2005.  Successive releases of the system have added detailed support for areas of the business process where requirements only became clear once the system was in use.

Clearly, if everyone could develop an enterprise application from scratch in a few weeks, supporting a complex set of business processes and serving users all over the UK, we wouldn’t be taking the time to tell you about it.

The things that made this possible were:

• The business team at British Energy who had worked extensively on the development of the new processes required to define and manage the programme of work
• A small datb development team (2 developers) who worked closely with the business team to understand these requirements and to help to refine the specifics as the system was built
• The use of our database application development system kinodb, which enabled the system to be built in a fraction of the time that would be required using any other means of development
• The initial implementation of a minimal system enabled very early delivery of business benefits and allowed enhancements to be driven by real business need rather than second-guessing during the design phase.

Normally, developing enterprise applications incrementally, and with this level of user input, just isn’t an option.  Using kinodb it has been possible to refine business processes, and their support by IMS, based on actual experience, and to reflect these refinements in IMS within days.  This is in contrast to traditional development environments where guesses and assumptions made during the design phase become embedded in the implementation of the system and can take months or years to rectify.