South East Water

BizTalk Server Benefits for South East Water Limited

South East Water (SEWL) is one of Melbourne's three metropolitan retail water businesses. SEWL are a state-owned Company providing water and sewerage services to over 586,200 residential, commercial and industrial customers. SEWL services 1.3 million people throughout 3,640 square kilometres from Port Melbourne to Portsea and Mordialloc to some 40 kilometres east of Berwick.

The Situation

SEWL manages infrastructure and assets with a net book value of $1.2 billion (as at 30 June 2004), which are employed to meet the diverse needs of its 537,700 residential, 48,500 non-residential and 7,580 trade waste customers. SEWL operates under a 'comparative performance' regime. This involves comparative reporting of the retail water industry's performance by the Essential Services Commission (ESC).

SEWL is a highly focused organisation, committed to delivering excellence and leadership in our environmental, social and financial performance. Using the latest information management systems and practices, SEWL closely monitor, verify and report performance to ensure all key aspects of their business and operations meet or exceed their stated targets.

Traditionally, development of integration between SEWL systems has always been the domain of the project requiring the integration. This led to a large number of non-standard patterns and practices that suited only the project that they had been developed for. This approach had several key disadvantages for SEWL:

  • The wheel was reinvented with each project - i.e. very little or no reuse;
  • The System Owner had little or no control over the integration. They may not even have known of its existence. This prevented capacity planning and control over data;
  • The System Administrator / Operator had little or no control over the integration;
  • Changes to a system could render other systems inoperative;
  • The integration was designed for a specific project and did not take future needs or needs of other areas into account; and
  • Operation management became very difficult and time consuming as there are no standard control mechanisms.
  • SEWL's Integrated Hub was then built with the intention to provide the infrastructure and controls to allow the individual blocks to be taken to create innovative complex services to meet business needs by projects regardless of their size. This would mean a small internally developed project is to be on equal footing with big multi million dollar projects and systems, without additional costs.
    SEWL required an Integrated Hub to:
  • Promote re-use by providing a standard set of entities (eg. Customer; Property; etc) and easily extendible web service interface for systems;
  • Keep System Owners informed of what integrates to their systems, the data being utilised and activity reporting provided by BizTalk to enable capacity planning;
  • Provide control for the System Administrator / Operator through BizTalk over the integration. For example: switching from Affinity Live to Affinity Contingency or stopping integration temporarily while a system problem is addressed;
  • Provide a standard interface with standard entities which insulate integrated systems from changes within those systems; and
  • Provide a framework and sound basis for SEWL wide integration. Each web service would remain the domain of the project with the business need, but future projects could simply take that web service and build on it to meet their needs without disrupting existing users.

The Challenge

SEWL discovered a few problems with 'The Hub' quickly. After their first attempt to fix the problems, it took only a week for the issues to surface again. SEWL tried to resolve these issues for a month before calling in Readify.

Along with maintaining consistency, the biggest challenge of this project was to deliver an operational solution within the short time frame. The solution also had to maintain the high security levels required to protect SEWL's customer database, containing details for 1.6m people.

Functionality provided natively within BizTalk 2004 was to be used in preference to developing the same functionality using another means. E.g. it was not acceptable to develop data transformation in a C# class instead of using the BizTalk transformation facilities.

The Solution

"Although several other specialists were under consideration, SEWL found Readify to be the right choice because Readify were able to supply a BizTalk evangelist and Readify's business model meant that the project would not encounter any takeover threats", says Paul Pavlinovich of South East Water Ltd. "Unlike the solutions offered by other organisations, Readify's solution used the full functionality of BizTalk."

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For More Information

For more information about Readify services, call +61 3 9600 2339 or 1300 666 274 (within Australia) or visit the website at http://www.readify.net/.