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Electricity Pricing, Lodestar Development for EDF Energy

LODESTAR and EDF Energy Logos

LODESTAR's PricingExpert was customised in order to satisfy the requirements of a large energy company. Geode Software was invited to join it in order to extend their web application by providing additional screens and database functionality. The web pages were written in Javascript, linked to an Oracle (9i) database and the LODESTAR COM object framework.

Introduction

LODESTAR produces a software package called PricingExpert, part of Customer Choice Suite for the energy market. It has been developed to help energy companies reduce their costs in preparing quotations for high energy consumers. Energy companies use the software to generate contracts for each of their customers, based on their particular patterns of energy usage. The software is very complex internally, although this complexity is presented to sales staff through an easy to use browser interface.

EDF Energy is one of the largest energy companies in the UK. They employ over 11,000 people, supply gas and electricity to over five million customer accounts, and are a major energy generator. To help reduce the costs of preparing contracts for new business, they have chosen to use Lodestar PricingExpert. However, they required the software to be modified to allow them to group sites, perform more detailed negotiations and for dynamic creation of products and offers.

Summary of the Work

Visual Design

Visual Changes to CCS

The changes to the LODESTAR software had been designed and formally approved by EDF Energy before the project started. Geode Software was required to create a number of new ASP screens, to be written in Javascript and to use the existing framework and follow the same style. It was important to LODESTAR that the changes should appear part of the application and not stand out as different. Therefore, both the visual style and the programming style were kept consistent with the original software.

Web Page Performance

AJAX was used in some of the new screens to allow the user to stay on the same page, while making changes to the underlying data. Some screens that should have required large amounts of data to display them were improved using AJAX. Only the data that was required at the time was returned to the browser. More data was loaded as a result of the user's actions, such as clicking on an icon to view the properties of that contract. This reduced the load on the database server, web server and the network connection to the browser.

Database Query Performance

A large proportion of the work involved the design of complex database queries. Maintaining performance to certain levels was a major concern, so the queries were written to be as efficient as possible, reducing the load on the server as well as the amount of network traffic involved between the web server and the Oracle database server. Stored procedures written in PL/SQL were used in the more complex areas, such as changes to pricing in each contract for all sites in customer's contract.

Technology

  • ASP. Javascript used both server-side and client-side
  • XML/XSLT (Transformations).
  • AJAX. For improved performance and more application-like behaviour
  • Oracle (9i). PL/SQL Stored Procedures

Benefits

  • Easier to create energy contracts for multiple sites.
  • Sites can be grouped and energy contracts can be accepted at any level.
  • Energy contracts can be negotiated on-screen.
  • Re-pricing occurs dynamically as changes are made, helping the negotiator respond to the customer.