CASE STUDY : Red Hat Eases Reporting Issues At CESC, Kolkata

CESC, an RPG company-brought thermal power to India more than 100 years ago
and supplies power to Kolkata, serving a population of 11 million across its
licensed area, spread over 567sq km. Maintenance of the power distribution
network is one of the most vital activities of the organization.

Project

CESC wanted someone to develop and deploy a software solution that covers all
the activities right from reporting of the problem to its resolution and
generation of associated statistics to support decision-making. The main drivers
for the project were enhancement of consumer service, efficient deployment of
manpower and a better planning of the distribution network. CESC planned to
deploy a CRM solution to achieve its objectives.

Pre-deployment scenario

Before automating the whole process, CESC faced operational inefficiencies
and there was no transparency in the working. “Our top-level management didn't
know the exact information on the working of the ground level staff, as every
thing was in a scattered form,” informed Goutam Baul, Sr Deputy
Manager-Corporate Systems, CESC, Kolkata.

Process

CESC preferred to go for CRM for various reasons. “There were power distribution
issues and due to that we had commercial issues. We thought CRM would be an
ideal solution for us, since there were 75 locations in the total distribution
network,” Baul said.

CESC Vendor: Red Hat Service provider: In-house team in CESC Open source technology/component used: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, PHP 5.1, Apache 2.2, and MySQL 5.0

The application was to be used by people scattered across the city. All the
locations were connected via captive fiber optic cables. The CESC administration
decided to use web technology for the system, as it would help in the management
of the application to a larger extent.

It chose the open source model for automating the process and hence CRM was
built on the traditional Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) model, where MySQL
5.0 acted as a database, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 was the OS and PHP 5.1 was
the scripting language. The Red Hat cluster suite was used to have automatic
fail over feature in case of a failure of the hardware. All the servers starting
mail server were completely made to run on the Linux environment.

The in-house team of CESC integrated the complete process, as it had the
necessary expertise in both the development and integration areas.

Challenges

Automation was a major challenge for CESC, as the workers felt that
automation would cut down their jobs and CESC had to convince them that it was
just for increasing the efficiency of the work. On the technical side, since the
technicians were comfortable with Microsoft, transition to the Linux-based
environment was a difficult job. “Couple of our people had expertise over Unix
and they were hand holding the other technicians, so everyone was excited about
the challenge and enjoyed working on it,” informed Baul.

Why open source?

Baul cited cost as the primary reason for CESC to go in for open source. “Our
top level management was impressed by the lucrative cost benefits that open
source possessed. Everywhere cost benefit is given primary importance and since
open source had that quality, we had no second thought in going for it.
Secondly, open source is the area where one has the freedom to work. Technically
speaking, we can play with the applications and customize it according to our
requirements. Even in this project, our technical team customized the CRM
func­tionality according to our requirement,” he claimed.

Time and cost

The implementation cost was cheaper for CESC, as the networking was done
through their in-house team. Due to the open source model, the development cost
was also minimal. However, the deploy­ment took some time for CESC to get
completed. “Since, we had to build it from scratch, Proof-of-Concept (POC) was
done for around two and a half months and it took three to four months to
complete the whole set-up. But the CRM deployment took a longer time, as we had
to deploy it over 10 districts. We started by deploying the solution in one
district and there were lot of political issues due to which it took a year for
completing the first one. However, after solving the issues, the rest of the
deployments were done within six weeks time,” informed Baul.

Post deployment scenario

The system has helped the workforce to monitor problems and eased
supervisory control. From the customers' point of view, CESC had a better
experience while contacting the helpdesk. “Properly trained personnel attend
their phone calls and provide a better response. The workforce now is not
required to attend the telephone calls and thus can focus better on the
repairing work. The supervisory control has become more effective with the help
of the statistical reports generated,” he informed.

NR SETHURAMAN

sethuramannr@cybermedia.co.in