Government and Defense – Kent County Council

Customer Profile

Commercial Services functions as a Trading arm / Services Arm for Kent County. As such, they provide various types of services to many other counties (like an ASP model) from providing leased cars, stationary for schools, billing services etc.

As such Commercial Service is a self-funded legal entity of Kent County Council and IT independent. They go out and BID on projects and services within local government, as a result many counties,schools, various government departments and local government services will benefit from Fiorano Software's technology via services being offered by the Commercial Services arm of Kent County.

Business Problem

A little over a year ago, Commercial Services embarked on a project to buy bulk electricity from power generators in the UK, thus securing better pricing, and in turn selling the power to schools, Hospitals,various local government offices and services, waste management divisions across many local counties in the UK.

Included in this service was and is to provide automated billing to all their customers. The application that is designed to purchase electricity and invoice customers needed to be automated and have the ability to be scaled up rapidly due to the fact that Commercial Services has roughly two thousand small sites across the UK that purchase electricity from them, with yearly invoices generated in the tune of 150 million pounds.

The application is required to automatically purchase electricity from the generators, the generators bill KCC (Commercial Services); KCC validates the purchases and then bills the customers for usage. Commercial Services has sold this offering to their current customer base and a major part of the offering was the ability to provide bills in PDF that can be printed out, since 80% of current customers still like to receive their bills in print format.

The current system needed to be enhanced, so that such features could be offered remotely to their customers.

Why Fiorano

The additional features could have been done in .Net, but issue was that it would take a VERY LONG time to do this in a .Net environment.

Due to time over runs from previous projects, and the inability to extend the due date to launch the enhanced services for billing electricity usage, KCC was under huge pressure to develop and deliver the enhanced functions.

Fiorano was selected as it was the only product after an intensive review process via RFQ's and RFP's that demonstrated the project could be done and delivered within a very tight schedule and within budget. It also allowed KCC to become vendor independent of a .Net environment, and now KCC can easily sell more services as since it is so easy and fast to develop additional functionality in the application using Fiorano's tactical Message Driven SOA approach to integration and application development. With Fiorano MDSOA technology, KCC can easily connect their system to all their partner systems, capitalizing on the ESB concept.

The system now allows KCC to offer flexible billing to all their customers on the fly.

About Fiorano Software

Fiorano Software (www.fiorano.com) is a leading provider of enterprise class business process integration and messaging infrastructure technology. Fiorano's network-centric solutions set a new paradigm in ROI, performance, interoperability and scalability. Global leaders including Fortune 500 companies such as Boeing, British Telecom, Credit Agricole Titres, Lockheed Martin, NASA, POSCO, Qwest Communications, Schlumberger and Vodafone among others have used Fiorano technology to deploy their enterprise nervous systems.

To find out more about how Fiorano can help you meet your enterprise integration objectives, visit www.fiorano.com or Email us, we will contact you!