About the Company

Around the world, National Grid operates in the field of electricity transmission, distribution, retail as well as in the telecommunications sector and in a number of related businesses and services.  In the UK, National Grid owns and operates some 7,000 route km of the 275kV and 400kV high voltage electricity transmission system in England and Wales.  Using its electricity transmission network, National Grid plays a central role in the UK electricity industry.  National Grid continuously balances power supplied from generating stations and other network interconnections with the power requirements of the distribution companies and large industrial customers.  The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of National Grid Group plc that is listed on the New York and London stock exchanges and is one of the UK's FTSE 100 companies with an annual turnover in excess of £3.8 billion in 2000/2001.

Challenges Faced

  • Implementation in demanding timescales

  • Next-day unified view of data analysis

  • Interactive user-defined reports and queries

  • Easy and secure deployment over corporate infrastructure

On 27th March 2001 the UK Energy minister, Peter Hain, announced the launch of the New Electricity Trading Arrangement (NETA) marking the commencement of new processes and systems for buying and selling wholesale electricity in England and Wales.  The NETA programme, initiated jointly by the regulator of gas and electricity markets, Ofgem, and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), replaced the Electricity Pool that was set up after privatisation of the electricity industry in 1990.  NETA fundamentally reforms the arrangements by which electricity is traded and one of the electricity "markets" introduced is the Balancing Mechanism.  In the Balancing Mechanism, National Grid as System Operator, accepts bid and offers from market participants, in real-time, to continuously match electricity supply with demand ensuring that power system health, security and supply quality is maintained.

As the sole holder of the licence for electricity transmission in England and Wales, National Grid has the statutory duty to develop, maintain and operate an efficient and economical system of electricity transmission.  To help with this role, National Grid procured a new National Grid Economic Data-warehouse (NED) system.

The challenge was to implement, in very short time scales, a new system to capture and archive a complete picture of the Balancing Mechanism process overnight and deliver a unified view for analysis every morning to National Grid users. 

Success Strategy

  • Experienced Integrator

  • Leading off-the-shelf products

  • Web-based technology

Tata Consultancy Services designed, implemented and integrated products from Cognos, FAME, Sun, Microsoft and Oracle, tailoring it to National Grid's particular business requirements.  The system also had to be delivered in very demanding time scales despite having to interface with other systems also being developed for NETA.

The new Sun database server and Microsoft web server runs a multi-Terabyte data warehouse designed, customised and integrated by Tata Consultancy Services, Asia's largest global software services company, using Cognos business intelligence, Oracle 8i database and FAME time series analysis technology.

Commissioned on time to "go live" at NETA launch, the National Grid Economic Data warehouse (NED) provides access to a unified view of data through a web browser over the corporate Intranet.  Analysis facilities are provided in the form of standard tabular and graphical trend reports, interactive user-defined queries and interactive multidimensional aggregated views.

Cognos BI Solution

  • Cognos web-enabled business intelligence products

  • Cognos UpFront for secure web portal

  • Cognos PowerPlay Web for interactive tabular and graphical multi-dimensional aggregation reports

  • Cognos Query for user-defined, ad-hoc queries through a web browser

National Grid's Project Manager, Ranjan Mohanty, explains that the Cognos products were chosen because "During evaluation, the Cognos business intelligence products were found to be easy to use and deploy as a scalable, web-enabled solution."

Cognos web-enabled business intelligence products helped rapid and easy deployment to end-users through the corporate Internet Explorer web browser that is available on each National Grid employee's desktop computer.  Secure access was provided through the Cognos UpFront web portal.  Configuration of the corporate infrastructure firewalls required minimal configuration effort because the interactive web displays and reports provided by the Cognos products are purely HTML and Javascript.

A new feature for end-users are the point-and-click interactive multi-dimensional aggregation reports, provided by Cognos PowerPlay, that allow users to view clear graphical as well as tabular reports.  Users can now drill down to the appropriate level of detail and save their own views in areas for private or general access.

Cognos Query provides the users with the ability to define and extract data based on ad-hoc queries made on the data warehouse through the web browser.  End-users need not know complicated query languages to set up general queries.  Queries set up by one user can be stored privately or shared with other users.

Data extracted using Cognos PowerPlay and Query can be exported in different formats for use with other tools familiar to users or even incorporated into published documents.

Business Benefits

National Grid's previous post-event analysis information systems, replaced by the new system, ran on a mixture of stand-alone databases on a variety of platforms, provided less user-interaction and needed greater resources to maintain and support.

The new management information system increases consistency and accuracy. The wider scope of the business information now provided enables better analysis based on which commercial decisions can be made in the operation of the Balancing Mechanism.

Commenting on the importance of the new system, Ranjan Mohanty said "The NETA Balancing Mechanism is complex and a large amount of technical data, commercial transactions and metered information is collected, archived long-term and analysed.  It is essential that National Grid has easy access to this stored data to help us manage the operation and analysis of the market"

This analysis helps National Grid operate the transmission system, plan bid/offer acceptance strategies and make commercial decisions in the operation of the NETA Balancing Mechanism process.

"National Grid and Tata Consultancy Services along with subcontractors have worked together and delivered an integrated system, connected in a secure manner to our corporate network. The system worked well with real data on day one and promises good availability, reliability and will facilitate future expansion to meet the enduring business need because it is based on a solid proven platform." says Ranjan Mohanty.

The success of this innovative project was summarised by Ranjan Mohanty as:

"Meeting tight deadlines, cost, requirements and quality while still delivering a reliable, expandable, integrated data-warehouse system is a significant achievement for all those involved in the project."

Next Steps

Consolidation and analysis of collected data since commissioning the new system is the first priority.  Wider dissemination of standard analysis reports throughout National Grid is planned next.  Discovery of patterns in the Balancing Mechanism through the data is already underway and the incorporation of a data mining tool in the future is being investigated.