Wisconsin Power & Light (WP&L)

Business Driver

• Deregulation forcing WP&L to compete on customer service
• Four-way merger into Alliant Utilities
• Need flexible customer information system (CIS) to survive and deal with exponential increase in number of customers
• Y2K
• IT slow to reach to rapid change
• CSR turnover
• Tight batch window
• Premise based
• Enhanced billing capabilities

Results

• Re-Architect Open 3-tier C/S
  • Rapid enhancement Implementation
  • Y2K compliance
• Rearchitected to an open 3-tier C/S
  • 12 months project duration for Rearchitecting
  • Rapid enhancement Implementation
  • Y2K compliance
  • total transition in 18 months

Source Environment

• Character 3270; BMS Screens;
• COBOL/CICS & Batch;
• IMS/ VSAM;
• 3.5 Million LOC Cobol
• 700+ Users; 300 Screens;
• 400+ IMS/VSAM entities: 100 GB Data;
• 12hr - 72hr batch cycle; 150 batch programs

Application - Target

• Client - PowerBuilder, Java
• Functionality - ANSI C
• Data - Oracle
• Environment - HP-UX

Benefits

• Faster time to market (3 - 4 months)
• Customer internet access
• Customer-centric Relational db
• 24x7 operation
• Non-utility billing feature