Quoin led a project team through an intensive year-long effort to support online customer and account management at a major utility. The project was instrumental in the deregulation of power generation and distribution in the region, and it enabled retail and commercial customers to choose providers. The key challenge for the project team was to create an architecture for the heterogeneous environment of legacy and new systems and to provide accurate and timely account information to consumers.
DTE Energy is a 100-year-old utility that encompasses power generation, distribution, and trading. At this time, the company was under intense market and regulatory pressure, and it had to adapt its legacy systems and development organization for deregulation. Quoin led a 40-person team in the development of a new B-to-C customer management system. This multi-year effort was a key element of their strategy to support the deregulation of the energy production and distribution markets in the State of Michigan. The project operated under unusual legislative scrutiny due to the size and public status of the client. The web-based Customer Choice system supports retail and wholesale customer accounts.
This was a complex engineering project because of the need to integrate with critical billing and other legacy mainframe systems. We were responsible for system architecture and the full development lifecycle. Quoin designed the system to support the rapid deployment of a lightweight user interface and extensible server architecture. The project marked a significant change in the development practices for DTE Energy – the first release was achieved after six months in an environment accustomed to a three-year development lifecycle.
- ECIT system supports wholesalers, retails, and consumers of electricity.
- The project team delivered the initial release in 6 months and has helped to redefine the standard for development projects.
- The resulting systems are easier to use, extend, and maintain.