WHY TESTING IS KEY TO MODERNIZATION

THE CASE FOR PROFESSIONAL TESTING AND OUTCOME MANAGEMENT

YOUR NEXT PROJECT IS ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR TESTING 

 

Utility companies must modernize their IT infrastructure to meet the demands of today’s customers. This transformation is a journey, and it comes with moving parts that require multiple phases of testing and validation. If you don’t test enough, you could miss defects that impact functionality and decrease customer satisfaction. If you spend too much time testing, you could end up wasting time and money.  

 

Some companies will dedicate internal resources to testing because they know the business; this should save time and money, right? Not necessarily. Reassigning existing resources can end up costing businesses more in the long run, taking people away from their full-time jobs and placing pressure on the rest of the organization to pick up the slack. In fact, most utility companies do not have an adequate number of resources to properly test and validate the new features, capabilities and vendor system integrations.  

3 VALUES OF PROFESSIONAL TESTING WITH VERACITY 

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Unparalleled experience

Our professional testers walk in the door with years of knowledge in QA, UAT and SIT processes as well as with the most common test tools in your industry today. We understand requirements traceability, entrance/exit criteria, how to write a test case, the different phases of testing and many other areas.

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A taste for bugs

We love to find defects—that’s our job! We seek out bugs in your systems, and we expect to find them. Internal resources are often disappointed to find a defect and can’t understand why it wasn't done right the first time. We understand this will occur and we dig deep into the systems to find, correct and track the defects. 

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DEDICATION

We understand the schedule implications of being the last major effort in the development lifecycle prior to go live. And we understand the need for overtime and weekend work when it’s required to meet your schedule. Don’t worry; we got this!  

 

MODERNIZE WITH CONFIDENCE

Take a deep dive into Veracity's Utility Practice capabilities and learn how we partner with utility companies to develop a roadmap for success in IT infrastructure, grid management, centralized data sourcing, process improvement, and pre- and post-merger change management. 

 

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SUCCESS REQUIRES BALANCE

 

The right balance can be found by using a team of testers who can quickly enter a project without much ramp-up – a full team that has a proven track record of success implementing, testing, validating and managing defects in customer care and billing, meter data management, customer information systems, vendor integrations and other system releases. Veracity is that team.  

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DO MORE IN LESS TIME

Our professional QA and testing team can help you achieve positive outcomes across the digital landscape and your transformation journey – including content, software, UI updates, automation and infrastructure – to ensure all the work is accurate. This helps you mitigate risk over the long term: By making an investment now, you’ll save money later by reducing your cost overruns and unforeseen defects. 

You’ll also be able to do more in a shorter time. It keeps your business resources and other nontechnical roles free to focus on how they deliver value to your organization (instead of getting pulled into QA work on an ad hoc basis). 

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OUR EXPERTISE

We have managed or provided leadership for over $200 million in major utility client programs and initiatives such as:  

  • Enterprise architecture development
  • MDM and AMI conversion
  • Customer care and billing legacy conversion and implementation
  • Merger of systems for major acquisition
  • Outage Management System (OMS) implementation
  • Rebranding associated with a large merger
  • Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) conversion and implementation
  • New portal development and implementation
  • PeopleSoft conversion and implementation
  • Infrastructure upgrades

 

Our team of seasoned professionals provide the following utility delivery services:

  • IT infrastructure roadmap development
  • Technology integration and management
  • Centralized data sourcing
  • Business analysis and requirements management
  • Training and change management
  • Test governance and execution
  • Defect management
  • Program and project management
  • Strategic advisory services
  • Custom dashboards and analytics reporting

 

CASE IN POINT

Utility companies large and small face big decisions about their legacy and on-premise systems: It’s time to upgrade our platform – where do we begin? What business processes and supporting technology will we need? Do I have the right implementation and testing team in place?  

Veracity began an engagement with a large utility company in 2012. The company was embarking on a 5+ year business and IT transformation that would replace most of the core legacy business processes and supporting IT technology stacks, including meter-to-cash lifecycle, both pre- and post-merger. The transformation included the following key technology components:

  • Implementation and conversion to advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) metering technology 
  • Implementation of a meter data management system to support the AMI technology 
  • Conversion to an outage management system (OMS)
  • Implementation of a customer care and billing system
  • Development and implementation of new customer portals to support the customer care and billing system conversion and improve customer self-service capabilities
  • Implementation of service oriented architecture subsystems
  • Rebranding to support merger of systems

It became clear during the company’s transformation initiative that they did not have sufficient resources to test and validate all the new capabilities and functionalities. Veracity solved this problem by: providing a team of professional testers who contributed to 80,000+ hours of testing; validated data conversion results of 105 billion rows of data; completed 45,000 test cases; and our technical project managers and developers managed integrations for 40+ third-party vendor systems interfacing with the company’s customer care and billing and meter data management systems.

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