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AMI Automation for Smart Utilities

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Context and Background

The purpose of performing a case analysis is to bring forth solutions to a technology problem. Case analysis of a problem enable the problem statement to be understood and do a risk & cost analysis along with the identified use of technology components and its deployment. Action includes solution proposals, tasks to be executed to assemble various software components and enhancements to deliver solution.

Introduction

  • Power utility company has around 220 different business process scenarios within its electric division. To analyse the impact of changes in business process and/ or technical master data, there is a need to perform repeated test activities. The tests were based on either manual test steps or the use of complex custom excel based VB scripts.
  • The manual way of testing used to take more than two months of efforts to analyse change impacts on all 220 business scenarios. There were no error message handling options in excel scripts and there was also no way to keep trace of the steps, test data and reasons in case of any failure in the middle of running manual excel scripts.

Proposed Solution

  • To remove these manual testing ways and to bring more objectivity into the testing process, PMC was engaged to develop an automated test workbench with a fully scripted testing processes using the standard SAP tools. The project scope was to develop an integrated test system using SAP, PI and interface to communicate with smart metering software.
  • Prozia automated AMI business processes using standard SAP e-CATT and solution manager 7.1 tools. Deploying the advanced ways of scripting, linking scripts, sourcing test data via external and internal test data banks in SAP e-CATT tool, we built automation of all AMI business scenarios. Using Solution Manager, we could run all these automated scenarios in bulk and have created logs that could show the result of testing in a short span of time.

Overview of landscape components

Interfaces

Payload

Recommendations

  • The solution has since been enhanced to include customer specific test requirements with different deployment configurations. The solution is further enhanced to enable compliance with general data protection regulation (GDPR) for automated messages used for communication between SAP ECC and MDUS systems using PI/PO as middleware.
  • Several enhancements are implemented to build message header authentications, integration of data management ILM solution for building retention and residence policies. Upgrade middleware from a PI system to PO system, implement solution with multiple instances of ECC EhP 5,6,7 and 8 versions & upgrade SOLMAN 7.1 to SOLMAN 7.2 systems.

Review

  • The SAP Lab solution for testing AMI interfaces is a 100% customized solution to meet the requirements of Power Utilities.
  • Our team has in-house capacities to deliver AMI interfacing enterprise services solutions for meter reading, device management, interval data and billing and customer service.

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