Powergen - New Business Integration

	Powergen is a vertically integrated energy services business which is a part of E.on AG, the world's largest investor owned utility. Powergen was created from the privatisation of the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), and has since grown from an electricity generator into a producer, distributor and retailer of electricity in the UK.
Powergen is a large enterprise user of the CedAr e5 financials application. To date it has developed over 300 reports and interfaces utilising the e5 report writing tool, QED. This development has been undertaken in-house as part of the function of the Corporate Application Support Team. Since the beginning of 2003, elexa Consultants has provided ad-hoc support to compliment the skills of the team in order that the reporting and interfacing requirements of the business are met in a timely manner. elexa often had to provide support at very short notice.
To fulfil the requirements, the developer needed to have a great understanding of the whole CedAr e5 application - not just one small part of it. In each case the remit to the developer was 'This is the requirement of the report'. The developer had to be proactive and flexible as this requirement had to be investigated in detail and the output produced utilising best practices within the QED utility.
In March of 2003, Powergen identified a requirement to migrate a newly acquired business subsidiary into its e5 environment. This involved the development of a number of new interfaces within an aggressive timeframe. elexa started the work at the beginning of April 2003 and provided two people on-site to construct these interfaces. The approach taken was to base the interfaces as closely as possible to Powergen's existing interfaces as these were well written and proven. This was coupled with the fact that the existing interfacing requirements were well documented and made the task a little less daunting although still a challenge. In fact the challenge grew during the project a new interface was identified from a billing system. Originally this was to post directly into the General Ledger but a decision was taken to post part of the information into Accounts Receivable. To add to this, an initial take on of data for this interface was required, the requirements of which were slightly different to those of the daily interface.
After a period of user acceptance and business sign off, all the interfaces, including the AR billing, went live on time and to budget.
Powergen has confirmed that it was very happy with the work carried out and particularly praised the initiative and self reliance of the elexa staff working on site.
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