Technology Transformation
The migration of the Digital Asset Management of Britain’s 7,768km high-pressure gas transmission network to a new set of digital platforms following divestment. Despite the mammoth scale of the task, after 18 months of preparation and training 900 staff, the cutover happened flawlessly over a single weekend.
In 2003, National Grid – the England and Wales electricity transmission company – sold a controlling stake in National Gas, a subsidiary that operated Britain’s national gas transmission system, to a consortium.
To meet operational and regulatory requirements, all of the data and computer systems had to be migrated to standalone systems within National Gas. This massive, 18-month project included a simultaneous upgrade in digital capabilities.
One key element was a Digital Asset Management (DAM) transformation. National Gas contracted Capgemini Invent to design and manage the transition on a tight timescale, with a cutover planned for a bank holiday weekend.
The project was a mammoth undertaking. The DAM tracks critical assets, including the status and condition of every valve, pipe, tap and myriad other components that keep gas flowing freely and safely through a 7,760km network of high-pressure pipes. It’s like an operational central nervous system for the company.
At its core the programme had three components: replacing Ellipse, National Grid’s legacy asset management system, with Maximo, the industry-leading asset management product; migrating all critical policy and safety documentation from OpenText to SharePoint; and migrating all geospatial data from one instance of ArcGIS (Geospatial Information System) to another. And, of course, the operational staff using that system needed to be ready to do so. That was our task.
From the kick-off we focused on leading the entire team towards the delivery of a precise, accurate and successful migration of these and 12 other integrated systems against an exacting deadline over the course of one nerve-stretching weekend.
The project involved 26 different organisations, including technical delivery partner IBM, and more than 200 people over the cutover weekend.
Critical to success was the consultants’ understanding that the key would be human rather than technological. They took National Gas executives to India to meet their teams, organised monthly off-sites to reinforce collaboration and foresee and resolve critical issues, and empowered team leaders and trained 900 National Gas staff.
It worked: more than a million safety-critical records and 43 million data objects were migrated across a complex set of integrated systems, with only four minor glitches recorded.
The numbers the project achieved are unprecedented in the gas industry. The migration to Maximo from Ellipso involved 360,000 asset records, more than a million work orders and in total 43 million data objects. Some 4.9 million documents were moved to SharePoint and 12.5 million records to the Geospatial Information System.
For Capgemini Invent the lessons from this programme will improve the way we deliver similar projects for years to come. These primarily relate to how we orchestrated the various teams aligning incentives and ways of working and handovers between different parts of the organisation.
View the Capgemini Invent profile in the MCA Members Directory.