The liberalization of the German energy market since 1998 gives electricity customers the opportunity to freely choose a suppler of electrical energy according to their own needs. The resulting new supply structure required that electricity suppliers implement or create a supply management because they no longer supply only to customers in their "own" system area, but can also supply to customers whose supply points are located in the area of other system operators.

This was the motivation for the described system for an electricity supplier which was created at the time of the first association agreement.  This agreement regulated the processes and the corresponding rights and duties of the market participants in the liberalized energy market. Over time, the system was continuously enhanced and adjusted to the valid legal requirements at that time.

Task

• Realization of an application based on a database to manage the data and support of processes for supply by and provision on behalf of third parties and net use.
• Realization of application-specific maintenance, display and evaluation functions.
• Realization of interfaces to the surrounding systems (e.g. to a CRM system).
• Realization of market interfaces (UTILMD).

Objectives

An efficient tool for supply management was to be created to facilitate a largely automated flow of all regular processes in this environment.

Key Data

• Project Duration: 10 years
• Number of Employees: 1-10
• Number of Users: app. 30

Characteristics

• Management of supply point data (master data, energy industry data, metering points, and so on)

• Management of market participants data (system operators electricity suppliers) and the corresponding information (master data, NA conditions, metering costs, contract situation, control parameters for exchange of data, contact reports/notes, contacts, and so on)

• Bi-directional interface for communication with customer information systems (CRM systems) of the distribution department.

• Automated support of processes in clarification of supply (registration, cancellation of supplier) and termination of supply (deregistration)

• Management of the UTILMD messages exchanged with the market participants (registrations, de-registrations, information about change and so on) including the enclosed information on supply points.

• Interfaces for the provision of data (among others, market participant data, conditions) for different organizational units, and external systems (e.g. SAP, intranet applications)

• Protecting data portfolios against unauthorized access by authorization management

The system was developed as a client/server system based on Oracle using an MS ACCESS client. Background applications (also MS access) are used to automate various processes.

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