THE CHALLENGE
The Data Communications Company (DCC) required support and maintenance for the Dual Control Organisation (DCO) and Commissioning Party System (CPS) applications. The DCO and CPS systems are incredibly complex systems and provide essential support to critical national infrastructure.
COMMISSIONING PARTY SYSTEM (CPS)
The CPS plays a key role in the migration of all SMETS1 smart meters from legacy head-end systems, also known as SMSOs, to the new DCC ecosystem by carrying out the commissioning of millions of SMETS1 installations on behalf of suppliers where requested.
DUAL CONTROL ORGANISATION
The DCO provides, amongst other security functions, the detection of all commands sent to millions of SMETS1 smart meters and ensures all commands are correctly authorised by a supplier and will not affect supply
THE SOLUTION
Critical Software used its knowledge of the DCC and its internal operations to offer expertise and know-how to support DCO and CPS efficiently and effectively.
Our prior work with DCC and other key stakeholders meant we understood that efficient and effective collaboration was required to provide the service levels needed, not only from a contractual perspective but also from the perspective of always ‘delighting our customer’.
Early on, we recognised the suitability of an ITIL based service approach. In addition, using industry best practice was key to supporting and maintaining the developed components. Specifically, we provided the following capabilities:
• Knowledge management
• 24/7 Help Desk function
• Incident and problem management
• Service request management
To ensure rapid identification, logging, reporting and issue resolution, we co-located a permanent team promoting knowledge transfer in advance of system go-live, which enabled the continual monitoring of meter migrations coupled with the rapid turnaround of migration issues.
Lastly, in terms of maintenance, we continue to provide preventive (protecting the system from future problems), corrective (identifying and fixing problems) and perfective service (ensuring the system can take advantage of new technologies and be in a good state of readiness for new problems) support so that the DCO and CPS meet required reliability, availability and maintainability standards.
THE BENEFITS
Some of the benefits realised by the DCC from the solution provided by Critical Software are:
• A well-understood support model which ensures the systems provide the services demanded by the DCC.
• A well-maintained system solution that is demonstrably robust.
• The successful transference of DCO and CPS system risk from the DCC to Critical Software, demonstrating that the DCC is a mature and intelligent customer with and understanding of when and how to transfer risk to other industry partners.
• Improvements and fine-tuning of the DCO and CPS solutions can be requested, implemented and tested quickly and efficiently by a completely focused support team.
• An intimate knowledge of the DCC systems has been combined with our understanding of key stakeholders ensuring the right people are informed or involved at the right point so that failures are fixed rapidly and efficiently
THE TECHNOLOGY
• Jira & Jira Service Desk
• ITIL Framework
• Security Code
• HSM (Hardware Security Module)
• PKI/X.509 Standard