Eskom, the largest generator of electricity on the African continent, is implementing an advanced billing system, enabling meter readers to capture electricity meter readings with hand-held devices and immediately print invoices.
"Eskom's ability to measure electricity consumption and bill accordingly is vital to the company receiving revenue," says Ian Dreyer, project leader at Eskom's information technology department.
"To achieve accurate billing information, we have to ensure transfer of information from the mainframe to the hand-held devices via PCs."
"Dimension Data Group company SPL provided a middleware solution - Software AG's EntireX - for this data transfer," he says. EntireX ensures vital billing information will reach its destination - automatically, securely and timeously, ready to be loaded onto hand-held devices for use in meter reading.
"EntireX automates and streamlines the transfer of critical billing information between Eskom's central mainframe and PCs distributed countrywide. On a daily basis, each PC requests data which is transferred from the mainframe in one secure step," he says.
"Having historical readings available on site allows for immediate exception validation and, where field billing is undertaken, payment history is also required to allow an accurate invoice to be printed immediately," says Dreyer. "In turn, new readings taken are used to update the mainframe system."
"Transfer of records amounts to approximately 1000 per hand-held device per day," says Dreyer. "In Bellville in the Cape, one PC gets data for 30 hand-held devices, amounting to around 30 000 records being transferred to that PC alone.
"Countrywide implementation is under way and 40 PCs are currently receiving data but this will ultimately expand to around 100. Transfer speeds are excellent and we are confident our solution will stand up against these large data volumes," says Dreyer.
The benefits gained from the middleware solution are simplicity, automation, guaranteed delivery of data, and speed of data transfer.
"With EntireX we need only one tool," he says. "Data goes directly from our Adabas database management system to Microsoft Access on the PC. EntireX also compresses the data making the transfer even faster."
Dreyer says the current solution is far more secure than that used with the initial customer management and billing systems. "Although the system we used to transfer data worked well, our two concerns were firstly that the data downloaded to PCs sat unencrypted in flat files and could easily be changed and secondly, it was a manual exercise".
Due to a change in business focus, Eskom decided in 1996 to redesign and rewrite its Natural/Adabas customer management and billing systems. Four systems were combined into one, the redeveloped system being generated using Software AG's Construct. Following this, Eskom decided to automate the up and down load of billing information.
The solution meant taking the data from Adabas via the replicator of a major RDBMS to yet another RDBMS in a Unix environment. From here it was taken to a central PC-based database and then copied over the network to distributed PCs.
"The process was extremely slow and we had a major problem with the number of links - if any part in the chain was down, the transfer could not work,'" explains Dreyer. "The security risk of copying the database across the network was also an issue."
With this solution implemented in one area, Eskom's IT department also realised it was unlikely to stand up to the large data volumes which exist in other areas.
"We suspended rollout and, using Advanced Communication Interface (ACI), created the EntireX interface. It took only one week to get data transfers working. Within six weeks we came from nothing, through writing, testing and user acceptance to implementation," says Dreyer.
"A major challenge facing Eskom's IT department currently is the necessity to interface between different technologies, for example, Natural/Adabas, Oracle, SAP and various PC based systems," he says. EntireX can give a common interface to each of these applications, allowing them to recognise each other and communicate.
"We see large scope for EntireX in our business," concludes Dreyer.
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Dimension Data Holdings Limited
Dimension Data Holdings Limited is a global Information Technology Integration corporation based in Sandton, South Africa. The company which is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, has a turnover of approximately US$1.5 billion. The Group has representation on five continents and operates out of 36 countries. The Group has achieved a compound annual growth rate of 98% in turnover and 57% in headline earnings per share over the past 5 years. The Group is focussed on communications/ networking infrastructure and electronic commerce software applications, two of the highest growth sectors of the information economy.
SPL, part of the Dimension Data Group, has long been recognised as a high value IT partner to South African corporations and government. The company focuses on customer management, information management and enterprise systems.
Eskom
'Electricity for all' became the goal of South African electricity giant Eskom after the 1994 elections. The largest generator of electricity on the African continent, Eskom currently serves in the region of 2.5 million customers. Some of these customers are in fact municipalities who then re-supply the electricity to many more individual businesses and households.