Sagent Technology
Sagent Technology: A Complete Business Intelligence Platform Sagent provides comprehensive business intelligence software that allows organizations to simplify their decision-making processes. Decision processes in today’s world must adapt to constantly changing requirements and dramatically evolving sources of information and users.
Sagent provides a complete software platform for business intelligence, customer data quality, and business geographics, enabling utilities to reduce operational costs, increase profitability, and improve customer relationships. Sagent facilitates the rapid development of custom software solutions that target specific business pains and deliver a shor t-term ROI. Through its technology, ser vices, and business exper tise, Sagent suppor ts more than 1,500 customers worldwide. Sagent actively seeks to par tner with subject-matter exper ts and independent consulting organizations that target the utilities sector with innovative operational and analytical applications.
Business Intelligence Sagent’s Business Intelligence Lifecycle is a business-focused process for managing the design, technical implementation, and deployment of custom business intelligence solutions. With the BI Lifecycle, Sagent standardizes the BI development process so utilities can focus on the operational, financial, and regulator y complexities facing their businesses. The BI Lifecycle brings executive sponsors, business process exper ts, consulting engineers, and IT professionals together to close the gap between the amount of information available to a utility and the number of critical decisions it needs to make on a daily basis. Sagent’s Business Intelligence Platform is a complete, open, and scalable data integration and analysis infrastructure that supports every phase of the BI Lifecycle and allows utilities to aggressively develop custom analytic solutions that yield insight into their customers and operating units. Sagent’s BI Platform is unique in that it allows a utility’s senior business analysts to participate
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directly in the data integration process and to use their domain expertise to rapidly create new analytics in response to unanticipated information requests. Reports and analytics can be quickly disseminated to users and customers across the intranet using both Sagent and third-party query and reporting tools. Multinational utilities can take advantage of the fact that Sagent’s BI Platform is fully internationalized and is available in eight languages, including English, French, German, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Kanji, Korean, and Simplified Chinese. Advanced Business Intelligence Solutions Sagent’s BI Platform and BI Lifecycle have been used by major utilities to implement advanced business intelligence solutions. Supply Chain and Procurement Analysis Measuring the total cost of a specific utility ser vice requires an integrated view of the enterprise that spans procurement, accounting and materials management systems. Sagent’s BI Platform has been used at a major Southwestern electrical
ated meter and grid data to provide an empirical basis for forecasting demand. Because Sagent optimizes the structure of information for repor ting and analysis, separate forecasts can be easily created for residential, commercial, and industrial consumer groups. Outage Prediction and Management Much of today’s plant equipment is fully instrumented and provides the raw data needed to design and implement a costeffective preventative maintenance program. Sagent’s data integration capabilities can be used directly by engineers to integrate large volumes of disparate data from multiple brands of equipment, then prepare it for analysis by third-par ty statistical and engineering packages. Any engineering tool can access Sagent’s real-time data integration engine via standard inter faces such as ODBC, JDBC, and SQL. Sagent’s Centrus division provides business geographics and data hygiene tools that allow utilities to more competitively respond to their customers’ needs.
Sagent serves customers in 120 countries. Our energy customers include: British Petroleum, El Paso Energy, Southern California Edison, Montana Power Company, and Ontario Power Generation. utility to build a cross-functional data warehouse that synchronizes general ledger, credit card billing, and ERP data. With this integrated view, the utility can dynamically adjust budgets to account for shor t-term forecasted variations in unit operating margins and profitability. Energy Delivery Optimization Profitability depends upon the optimization of generation and demand and the ability to redistribute excess capacity at the most favorable prices. Sagent can be used to combine external information such as construction permit data with internally gener-
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Centrus products and ser vices are costeffectively implemented in leading utilities nationwide. These implementations include the following applications: Non-Customer Identification and Targeting Keyspan and other natural gas utilities use Centrus geocoding and spatial analysis tools to identify non-customers that are close to gas mains. Using third-par ty business and consumer list data that is geocoded and de-duped against the current customer list, prospects that can be easily ser viced are identified and targeted for conversion campaigns.
Work Route Assignment Utilities are using Centrus geocoding in conjunction with routing software to determine and lay out the most efficient routes for daily service deployments. This application also allows utilities to determine, in real-time, the location of field service crews in the event that dispatch assignments need to be changed. Facilities Management Entergy, as well as many other utilities, use Centrus business geographics capabilities to better determine where facilities should be placed in relation to customer need. By geocoding existing
customers who use the facilities and spatially relating them to proposed and existing facilities, more customer-friendly decisions can be made. Address Standardization and Householding of Accounts Moving from mainframe-based systems, utilities have adopted the server-based Centrus technology for address standardization and USPS CASS (Coding Accuracy Support System) certification. Using clean addresses as a foundation, these utilities have enhanced and consolidated multiple accounts to deliver a single unified bill to their customers. ■
Solution Provider
www.sagent.com
CONTACT INFORMATION Andre Boisvert Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer
Streamlining Decision-Making With the Sagent Solution With the advent of deregulation, a large northeastern provider of energy-related infrastructure and services had divested most of its generation assets and no longer functioned as a generator of power, but rather as a supplier, procuring energy and installed capacity resources on the open market from various wholesale suppliers. Deregulation has also impacted this supplier by expanding retail choice, giving greater flexibility to its customers while leaving the energy firm with increased volatility in demand and large price fluctuations in the market. This company had information systems in place designed to manage its operations within a traditional regulated utility setting, but these systems no longer met the needs of a deregulated environment. The company now had to manage its portfolio – its obligations to serve load and its contracts to buy and sell energy – in a rapidly changing marketplace under pressures of high financial risk. This supplier turned to Sagent to solve two business challenges: • Collect and analyze large volumes of data in different formats from different sources. Information used to make business decisions comes from internal sources, as well as external third-party content providers, and can include customer load forecasts, market prices, weather data, and customer information • Develop dimension models for quick and flexible access to the information. This company initially contracted with Sagent to supply energy accounting solutions. As the company saw the flexibility of the Sagent platform and its ability to integrate massive amounts of data from disparate sources and provide information to a broad base of users, it began applying the solution to the management of energy risk. The Sagent solution provided the company with: • An earnings statement on demand to measure the daily changes of the portfolio and how those changes impact earnings • Hourly forward and historic energy and capacity positions, including mark-to-market (exposure price volatility) for two years into the future • Retail choice analysis and statistics, including alternate supplier load and capacity obligation, which can be viewed by load aggregator, supplier, zone, and rate class • Customer shopping statistics that provide forward and historic views of customer demand, including the measurement of customer churn • Weather analysis and statistics for historical and forward views of temperature, dew point, and wind speed • Portfolio performance reporting that measures the impact of the business decisions over time
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John Maxwell VP and General Manager, Americas and Asia/Pacific Larry Scroggins Senior VP, Business Development Arthur Parker Executive VP and President, Europe Dave Henry VP, Marketing Steve Walden VP and General Manager, Centrus Sagent 800 West El Camino Real Suite 300 Mountain View, CA 94040 Toll-free 800.233.5478 Phone 650.815.3100 Fax 650.815.3500 BUSINESS CONTACT
Dave Henry
[email protected] Phone 360.582.0333
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