Oracle Customer Success — Stedin Diensten B.V.

Stedin Monitors Utilities Network Maintenance and Ensures Employee Safety with Mobile Application, Built Within Months

Oracle Application Express enabled us to reduce telecommunications and payroll costs in the operations and support center—while maintaining the same levels of customer service quality and employee safety standards—at just a fraction of the deployment time and cost that other suppliers were proposing.

— Frank Derickx, Team Lead, District Operations and Support Center, Stedin Diensten B.V.

Stedin Diensten B.V., one of the largest utilities distribution companies in the Netherlands, delivers electricity and gas to more than 2 million private, corporate, and government customers, and to one of the world’s largest ports, Rotterdam. The organization is responsible for the development, construction, maintenance, and management of the energy distribution network in most of the Dutch provinces of Zuid-Holland and Utrecht. Stedin is the link between more than 2 million customers and their energy suppliers. Focused on innovation, safety, quality, and transition to sustainable energy, Stedin invests continuously in modernization, replacement, expansion, and maintenance of the terminals, networks, and stations to meet the highest quality, safety, and efficiency standards.

Challenges

Ensure 24/7 monitoring of the gas and electricity network to quickly identify outages, allocate nearby engineers, and remedy any network fault
Track the time engineers spend inside electricity stations to protect their health and ensure their safety

Monitor power unit door controllers to prevent unauthorized access to Stedin’s facilities, and avoid possible technical malfunctions due to vandalism, power theft, or life-threatening accidents
Minimize system disruption for customers by coordinating planned maintenance and development activities to the low, medium, and high voltage distribution nodes as well as gas transportation lines
Reduce payroll and telecommunications spending in the organization’s control center with minimum investment in new technology, and without compromising quality of service, employee safety in maintaining power units, and short intervention times in case of an outage

Developed a mobile application that monitors electricity status in distribution stations, registers unlocking and closing of power units and cabinet doors, and connects field engineers to the organization’s contact center for fast allocation and dispatch of technicians to outage sites with Oracle Database, Oracle Application Express, and jQuery JavaScript libraries—in just four months
Eliminated telecommunications costs of more than 100,000 text message and phone call requests per year—such as thousands of technicians registering their presence in a facility to perform unplanned repairs—with fast and easy requests sent via the mobile application

Used Oracle Spatial Graph to automatically locate field workers and enable them to register time spent on maintenance through a mobile application—reducing costs by eliminating a full time employee who took calls from technicians to record time spent on maintenance prior to implementation
Enabled the control center to easily plan for routine maintenance and network development operations by using Oracle Fusion Middleware’s MapViewer feature to display which network sections and customers would be impacted by a service disruption
Saved valuable time for managers by enabling them to access customized reports that show presence and activities for each network asset—helping them identify and prevent outage trends, better plan maintenance and expansion work, and ensure proper staff allocation across the covered geography

Oracle was the best choice for us in terms of delivery timeframe and cost. It took four months to develop the mobile application from the first stakeholder interview to the first test version. Competitor solutions involved three times more time and six times more money for the same functionalities.

— Frank Derickx, Team Lead, District Operations and Support Center, Stedin Diensten B.V.

About Stedin Diensten B.V.

Headquarters

Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Employees

1,100

Annual Revenue

$1 to $5 Billion

Stedin Diensten B.V.

Partners

“Oracle Application Express is quickly becoming our preferred tool for developing mobile applications. Apps are easy to develop, maintain, and upgrade using standard web technologies and frameworks. For Stedin, we were able to develop a solution that is compatible with all major mobile operating systems at a fraction of the time and cost other suppliers quoted,” said Frank Klein, Project Manager, Yenlo B.V.

“We worked with Oracle’s Specialized Partner Yenlo to design, develop, and fully implement the new system. Yenlo is a specialist on several application, middleware, and database platforms, as well as Oracle and Java technology. Its service included architectural design, custom software development, and post-deployment support. Yenlo really did the heavy lifting and can be credited with most of the project’s success,” Derickx said.