ABOUT US

Power Catalyst has deep expertise and experience in decoupling application data from business applications, and creating new levels of business value by introducing robust data management methodologies and technologies. The liberated energy information can then be shared, reported and analyzed completely agnostic to the transactional systems that produced the individual bytes of data.

Current energy industry common practice dictates that businesses have selected a collection of energy applications to support their various operations. Trade Capture, Meter Data Management, Risk Management, EMS, Customer Management systems to name a few. In most cases our clients have made very good individual application choices, and those applications function very well when asked to run their day-to-day business.

However when these collections of applications are asked to perform in concert for reporting, exchanging data or producing energy information that requires the coordination of data between multiple systems, they tend to receive poor grades from the user community. This is not the fault of the application vendors. Their systems are specifically designed to produce the best possible results in their area of competence – and most do. The idea of coordinating data with other vendors' applications will ALWAYS be a secondary objective for your vendors.

The symptoms of an over burdened, application dependent business are:

• Reporting is 'fragile'. Application errors manifest themselves in failed reports, or worse reports with errors that go unnoticed.
• Multiple versions of the Truth – Independent business units produce different versions of the same story. This often leads to countless wasted hours investigating and defending each department's 'correct' results.
• Unproduceable business information – "We can't produce that data", or "That information will take months to produce." These are not answers that allow an agile business to make fast decisions, or meet regulatory deadlines.
• Selecting the wrong application vendor – When a business becomes too married to a particular application vendor it can become impossible to evaluate replacement applications based on their business merits. Instead, the application is chosen based on its ability to 'not break' the existing reporting and analysis environments.
• One off, brute force reporting – without a centralized understanding of the data in all of the applications, energy businesses are required to build reports from scratch each time. Or worse, pay individual vendors again and again to produce custom reports.
• Business processes are not driven by the business model, but by the application design. The operation of the business is highly inflexible.
• Old application decommissioning is daunting, with no infrastructure or competence available to migrate valuable data into a useable, accessible 'vault.'
• New application adoption is daunting, since no strategies and infrastructure exists for the acquisition of upstream input data and passing on of results to downstream systems.

When Power Catalyst is brought to the table, we introduce invaluable business concepts and apply them firmly to the software development effort. The resulting decoupling of the data results in the problems above being solved:

• Reporting is robust and accurate. Erroneous or failed data from upstream applications are identified prior to use in reports and analysis.
• One versions of the Truth – There will be a single version of the base data that all business units access, and only one definition for each element of data across the organization.
• Agile and fast production of business information – Power Catalyst's deep understanding of energy industry data produces an environment where data is stored and aligned along multiple dimensions. Thus creating an 'anything is possible' reporting/analysis environment.
• Application vendor selection is completely agnostic to existing reporting and analysis – Because the data is completely decoupled from the applications producing it, replacing an application only requires integrating the new application to the data repository – NOT re-writing all of your reports.
• An enterprise-grade integration framework that enables not only the timely update of the repository, but all communication among the business applications.
• Robust, reusable reporting structures – because the data is stored in one place, structures used to create one report can be easily reused in the creation of an infinite number of additional reports. Reports can be customized for individual users easily.

Power Catalyst provides a solution that meets the energy industry's key objectives and more:

• Provide a platform that allows companies to easily add incremental business functionality, solving current and avoiding future manual workarounds (artifacts of an inflexible system).
• Create an environment that easily scales for performance, introduces the ability to retrieve, archive, restore and roll back system processes, rules and data at will, and reduces operating and support requirements.
• Provide a high level of automation while not locking up functionality in proprietary code.
• Enable flexible and incremental upgrades of components to reduce costs and operational impact.
• Inherently design for broad and standardized integration, modular functionality, and monitoring capability to enable an enterprise view of the business functions.
• Anticipate an incremental migration strategy that can reduce downtime and improve transition stability and user acceptance.
• Enable your information systems staff to respond efficiently to problems and failures in the absence of proprietary "black boxes."

How We Do It:

Power Catalyst brings Energy Industry specific project methodologies and modeling strategies that when implemented, lead to deep understanding of an energy company's energy information assets.

Power Catalyst focuses on the organization and management of energy market and grid operations data. Our work includes:

• Creation and Implementation of data integration, consolidation and management plans
• Integration of processes and business lines through the definition of data vocabularies
• Distillation of actionable information from raw data
• Warehousing of large volumes of data
• Integration of data across systems
• Implementation and Deployment Plan

Once our business data repositories platform is in place, most of the work of deployment consists of configuring the system, not programming new code. This applies even to user business processes and administrative front-end user interfaces. The impact on project management is significant and the benefits measurable. Most importantly, the truly large tasks can be parallelized. Prototyping can support the definition of your business processes, rules definitions can begin without other components yet in place, and portal and business process tools can start implementing workflow using preliminary data flows and processes. Ongoing testing at fine-grained project stage gates is possible because there is always something being integrated or released. Larger stage gates can be drawn at available business functionality, not traditional milestones at which no information is available regarding the quality of the evolving solution.