CIOIN

K.B. Singh

VP and Head-IT BSES

“Complaints from consumers reflect negatively on the business and this had to change.”

Executive summary

CIO 100 Winner: This ingenious CIO of one of the country's largest power houses took to a business process automation solution to cater to customer complaints and made sure that 2.26 million customers didn't stay in the dark for too long.

In 2002, Delhi Vidyut Board was privatized and came to be known as BSES Power. Bringing light to over 2.26 million homes is anything but easy.  And, if you're fixing outages most of the time, that customer base could become history.

K.B. Singh, VP and head-IT, BSES, was determined to get these outages out of the way. "Complaints of consumers regarding electricity supply, breakdowns and shutdowns always reflect negetively on the business and this had to change," he says. In electricity distribution, operations & maintenance (O&M) requires data exchange and communication with support functions like stores and  meter management. For operational efficiency and good customer service, the O&M department needs proper visibility of the electricity network. "And unless all this data is available online, there is always a tendency of glitches in the operations which lead to delay in fault restoration and long outages resulting in poor customer service and other negative cascading effects," says Singh.

So, he took charge of the situation by automating O&M, through a business process automation solution titled CORE (converged operational & reporting engine). BSES implemented SAP R/3 for stores and meter management and GIS for network visibility. The OMS (outage management system) is the main O&M module used for monitoring electricity. It was seamlessly integrated with SAP R/3.

Interestingly, the OMS was also integrated with GIS so that the equipment used could be tagged to zero in on fault locations, cutting fault resolution time. It was a challnge for Singh to integrate different functional modules working on different platforms. And that too with zero downtime. Also, since this data is crucial and sensitive and any minor flaw during integration could cause a cascading effect for the operation.

But, structured planning, regular joint meetings with vendors and dedicated teamwork helped the team overcome these hurdles. "We developed a pilot and tested it to minimize risk and track its effectiveness," explains Singh.

Today, 90 percent complaints are attended to and resolved in less than two hours.  Power outages have decreased by 98 percent and transformer failure rate has come down from 15 percent to less than one percent.