CASE HISTORY

Yorkshire Electricity Group PLC (YEG)

Yorkshire Electricity Group (YEG) is one of the UK's leading energy companies. To deliver the business changes needed to support the opening of the competitive electricity supply market, scheduled to commence in September 1998, YEG established a group wide 1998 programme.

The design and delivery of a wide and complex range of new computer applications and business processes formed a key element of the 1998 Programme. To ensure that these were implemented smoothly with minimum business risk an extensive parallel programme of testing was established. Significant end to end testing, both internally and externally with other market participants, had already been successfully conducted.

Requirement:

YEG, keen to maintain it's leading position recognised, that with these complex internal and external interdependencies, extensive testing alone was insufficient to provide the confidence that the applications and processes could perform adequately with anticipated workloads across a range of differing business scenarios.

YEG decided to carry out business process simulation in a number of key areas. Opteama, utilising Casewise Corporate Modeler, were chosen to assist because of their proven ability to carry out this type of performance simulation and also to build on YEG's existing investment in Casewise.

Approach:

Opteama's first task was to analyse and redefine the already modeled business processes into a simulatable state. A number of workshops were then carried out to gather the performance metrics for each activity within the four key processes.

The performance metrics collected were primarily concerned with activity throughput, and included for each activity:

  • Resource required
  • Time taken
  • Functional profiles, namely available resource and working patterns
  • IT system profiles, namely utilisation per activity

Once established the processes were simulated across a range of different business scenarios and adjusted as required to reflect anticipated performance.

Benefits:

The simulation work flushed out many issues that would not have been recognised until after live operation had commenced. Additionally it provided business managers with the confidence and assistance to understand the dynamics of their future operations.
 

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