Tier 2 Consulting transforms smart meter logistics management for EDMI Europe

Following a major contract win to support the government's roll-out of smart meters, EDMI Europe needed to enhance its IT capabilities to track forward logistics in its supply chain, generate related contractual reports, and communicate these reports to its suppliers and end customers. With an estimated 10 million devices being shipped over the next 5 years, this represented a significant challenge.

    “Our existing solution was not fully fit to handle the increased volume of delivering millions of communications hubs. We needed to find an alternative with a level of automation that would ensure a more efficient, streamlined approach.  The solution defined by Tier 2 gives us all the functionality required without needing an army of people to deploy, manage, and maintain it.”  
-EDMI Lead Architect

As part of the UK Governments’ smart meter program, EDMI Europe won a contract to supply communication hub devices and service management to a major communications service provider, supporting secure data transfer between smart meters, in-home display devices, and utilities providers.

As a result, EDMI needed to enhance its IT capabilities to track forward logistics in its supply chain, generate related contractual reports, and communicate these reports to its suppliers and end customers.

In addition, EDMI needed to build a triage service to process devices that are reported as faulty. To determine if a device should be fixed or recycled, data from several sources needed to be compiled, processed, and stored.

With 10 million devices being delivered during the five-year contract, the triage system needed to handle hundreds of thousands of items.

EDMI chose Stevenage based Tier 2 Consulting to help it build a new IT solution underpinned by a flexible integration platform.

The solution facilitates integration with the EDMI forward logistics database, an FTP server and a separate testing system that sends data back to an integration platform. By combining that data with database information and using an IBM rules engine, EDMI can determine whether there is a true fault on a device, identify the responsible parties, and next steps.

Both this solution and the data communication solution run on-premise at EDMI's offices to comply with data security restrictions.

The integration technology comes in the form of a Red Hat JBoss Fuse ESB deployment. JBoss Fuse is a cost-effective, lightweight integration platform that offers modern enterprise service bus (ESB) capabilities to connect enterprise applications, application programming interfaces (APIs), services and IoT devices.

With JBoss Fuse, EDMI can connect to its customer's Salesforce order management system via web services, as well as the customer's File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers and MySQL database.

It provides a standard integration architecture approach and a single point of integration with EDMI systems, rather than point-to-point solutions that can be harder and more time-consuming to maintain.

“We are very happy with the way this project has gone.” said the Lead Architect. “It was very much a joint effort, and a smooth implementation process. Tier 2 has always been on time and delivered everything it said it was going to do. We’re confident enough in the solution that we’re now expanding what we’re doing with Tier 2," he added.

ABOUT EDMI

EDMI is one of the leading smart metering solutions providers in the world. EDMI designs, develops and manufactures innovative and technologically advanced energy meters and metering systems for the global utility industry. EDMI has almost 30 years’ experience with millions of EDMI smart meters installed worldwide. EDMI Europe Limited is based in Reading and is a subsidiary of EDMI Limited.

ABOUT Tier 2 Consulting

Tier 2 is a software development company building web and mobile applications. We use agile development methodologies for custom software build, combined with expert knowledge around the enterprise class open source products using Red Hat JBoss technologies.

We solve complex IT business challenges and help organisations embrace digital transformation.

Why? Because business is software and you can never stop developing.

Established in 2002, we partner growth businesses across a range of sectors, with the quality of our work evidenced by a number of long-standing clients, including King’s College London, Suzuki GB, Evident Legal, Motability Operations, EDMI Smart Meters, Alphabet (BMW), Wolseley Group, Lloyd’s of London and their brokers / underwriters.

 



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