Delivering efficiency in deregulated energy markets – AMT-SYBEX has the ‘Know How’....

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DTS - The proven and scalable Market Communication Platform for Utility markets

Across Europe, change is a continuing force in the highly competitive energy markets and efficient communication between market participants is essential. With customers continuing to exercise their freedom to switch suppliers combined with increasing competition, the data transfers within the market are becoming increasingly complex.

Our Data Transfer Solution, DTS is the industry's most powerful integrated solution available to Utility clients across Europe designed to manage data flows between industry participants and the increased data volumes associated with the introduction of Smart meters. It has been specifically created for use in competitive utility markets including provision for companies operating in Supply, Distribution and Metering market roles in the Gas, Electricity and Water industries. It is recognised by the utilities sector and by SAP ® with whom we are a valued partner and have achieved NetWeaver accreditation. It underpins the management of data flows between market participants, significantly lowering costs, improving the integrity of your customer data and ensuring enterprise systems remain compliant.

Greater harmonisation is being pursued within the EU and regional markets are emerging. The prospect of having to deal with more than one set of market rules can be a challenge without the correct IT solutions, but for those organisations deploying DTS catalogue functionality, the ability to manage local data formats and rules simultaneously becomes straightforward. DTS is scalable and a highly configurable product which enables the effective management of varying volumes of data flows.

In addition to the core solution we also offer

DTS for Industry Interaction & Market Communication with SAP for Utilities

The DTS product includes support for industry agreed Electricity and Gas market interfaces and also provides support for bi-lateral interfaces which may operate between participants and can incorporate support for a full Smart Metering solution in a single operational platform.

DTS provides any Market Participant with an industry interaction solution that can readily integrate with their core business systems and business process platforms while providing full validation, flow management rules, routing capability, flow searching/visibility, flow creation and exceptions management capability ‘out of the box’. Current DTS users include Centrica (British Gas), RWE npower, EDF Energy, Bord Gais and the Shippers in the Irish Gas Market.

   
DTS addresses a number of operational problems relating to Industry Interaction and provides:-

DTS Key Components & Features   

The AMT-SYBEX Data Transfer Solution (DTS) is a packaged application that has been specifically designed with the particular demands of industry interaction and market messaging for energy markets in mind. The solution design is based on important principles for market messaging that readily accommodate changing message structures and business rules. The product consists of the following key components:

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The core DTS industry module provides the validation capability and an open interface to corporate integration platforms which manage the transport and delivery of market messages/data flows to and from DTS. Individual components can then be selected from the Core Schema and User Applications to create a solution specific to the business needs of the customer.

External Interface

The external interface adapters provide the transport layer for moving files between DTS and either internal applications or external industry gateways. This interface layer makes use of the Client’s underlying preferred integration technology.

User Interaction

Flow Monitor – allows users to search for and view all data flows sent and received by the system. This includes both valid and invalid flows. The Flow Monitor also provides functionality to manage exceptions raised as a result of DTS catalogue validation or DTS business rule validation.

Flow Creation – allows the user to manually create and submit flows to the system for onward routing to internal or external systems

Admin – provides the user with an interface to perform system admin tasks such as maintenance of system parameters, maintenance of lookup data and definition and maintenance of user permissions. 

Market Message Processing 

Market Messages are registered and validated against the appropriate DTS Catalogue definition. The catalogue definition is easily updated to accommodate changes to market message processing without the need to make code changes to any DTS component. The validation includes structural and content validation including look-ups of valid values and checks for valid combinations of values within the messages. The messages are stored in a form optimised for subsequent access in the DTS Repository and a readily searchable index created to provide rapid search access to flows for end users or business rules processing.
   
Business Rule Processor 

This component processes valid files and messages and applies any business rules which have previously been design using the business rules editor. This component also applies any splitting and routing logic to files and  messages and tags them with a logical destination before passing them on to the Splitter. The rules composer provides an interface which allows users to define and configure the business rules which are executed against individual messages at runtime.

Splitter

This component takes valid files from the business rules processor and physically splits them according to the logical destinations identified by the splitting and routing mechanism. Once the files have been split they are passed to the Transform component

Transform

This component applies any transformations required to the split files. As these transformations are entirely dependant upon the processing requirements of the destination systems, this component is delivered ‘out of the box’ as a simple pass through, however, transformation rules can be assembled as extensions to the DTS catalogue to meet the needs of particular customer implementations.

Dispatcher

The dispatcher component maps the logical destination(s) determined by the routing rules to a physical destination queue.


Business Benefits 

Deploying AMT-SYBEX's Data Transfer Solution (DTS) will help your organisation realise the following Cost to Sell and Cost to Serve benefits:-

Isolating Exceptions within customer transfer and metering processes and trapping such exceptions before they pollute enterprise systems, saves time, effort and money

By removing or smoothing customer and/or metering related issues that cause significant administrative overheads and costs (e.g. increased call volumes and exception management) positive transformational effects are attainable i.e.

• Increased Brand Rating
• Reduced Operational Costs due to more efficient processing
  
• Reduced customer complaints
• Reduced customer churn

More Accurate Billing/Improved Credit Management - Through improved data quality leading to a higher percentage of bills being issued on time and error free. These factors in turn can lead to better customer payment performance and improved cash flow.

An Integrated Infrastructure provides an ‘open’ and highly scalable enterprise platform for support of multi product, multi supplier operations and delivers mission critical reliability, guaranteed message delivery and recovery from system failure. Provides flexible capabilities for existing and future IT infrastructures and support for major data migration requirements and industry change.

Better maintenance of Data Quality - Improved data integrity through a centralised store of secure and valid data to support all of the business processes. Enforced validation of all incoming and outgoing data to ensure future integrity.

Visibility & Control - Increased visibility and control of the End to End processes allowing a more timely and accurate response to be provided to queries. Tighter control of processes resulting in improved process cycle times. Greater control of commercial contracts and non-contractual relationships between participants, and improved visibility of participant performance.

Improved and more timely management decision making  - Through improved Reporting and Management Information based upon a central view of the end to end process data and the use of powerful reporting tools.

Reduced Resources - Through DTS Business Rules, many registration exceptions can be automatically removed and managed. This can reduce the resources needed to staff call centres, billing and registration teams and credit management activities.


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