Published on the 03/05/2016 | Written by Beverley Head

Installing a new business analytics platform that business users could drive themselves paid for itself in a year –  letting Horizon Power reduce headcount and expenses…

While benefits are already accruing – the organisation is gearing up for the next phase of its business intelligence adventure, taking data from smart meters being rolled out into WA homes, and also from sensors across the network, in order to optimise operations.

West Australia based Horizon Power provides power across 2.3 million square kilometres of the State, to 48,000 customers. Owned by the State Government, it relies on subsidies to meet WA’s commitment to offer everyone in the State access to affordable energy.

But as Geoff Pearson, the company’s business intelligence co-ordinator notes, the organisation was under pressure to rein in costs to keep those subsidies in check. “Business reporting was an area we could make significant savings,” said Pearson during an interview with iStart.

Previously a Cognos user, which Pearson describes as “labour intensive”, the organisation shifted to QlikView which has allowed Horizon to devolve business reporting to business users and shed a number of full time employees who were previously charged with delivering reports

Horizon takes data from its Ellipse ERP (an ABB software platform aimed at asset intensive businesses), its billing and meter data management system each morning, automatically normalises the data to make sense to the business user, and then allows end users to use QlikView to create the reports they require.

“We deliver all the information to all the business users and they decide what reporting they want,” said Pearson.

At present the data is sourced from the business information software – but an initiative to roll out smart meters to customers’ premises is now three quarters complete, and Pearson said the insights that provides about what consumers do with their energy will be valuable. “It allows us to actually model what is going on in the network,” he said. “We could look at the transformers which customers are tied to and see whether they are appropriately balanced.

“We have got a project currently scoped to take advantage of the new data. It could enable an engineer to go into Qlik and check on a transformer or see hot spots in the network” that could be addressed more rapidly than the current regime where network data is collected on an occasional basis.

There could also be the option of offering consumers more control over their consumption once they understand how and when they are drawing power. “At the moment we don’t offer time based tariffing,” said Pearson. “We are going through a review to do that.”