While continuously striving to extend paramount services to its customers, Sui Southern Gas Company, one of the region’s most IT-enabled utility employs state-of-the-art technologies, through regular induction of best business practices.
The highly skilled and talented team of Information Technology department along with associate departments recently accomplished yet another triumph that stands huge by all standards. The team saved well over USD 3 million by upgrading the prime technologies entirely through the deployment of its own personnel and resources, without taking the help of external consultants.
The team saved over USD 1.8 million in upgrading Company’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) whereas over USD 2 million were saved in the up-gradation of Customer Care and Billing (CC&B). 15 modules of the Oracle eBusiness Suite were upgraded from version ‘11i’ to version ‘R12’ whereas the database was upgraded from version ‘9i’ to version ‘10g’. The CC&B’s database was upgraded from ‘10gR2’ to ‘11gR2’ with its applications enhancing from Oracle’s version ‘1.5.20’ to ‘2.3.1’.
The enormous success of these projects materialized due to the vision of Company’s management that long ago envisaged an investment in its own human resource rather than hiring any external expertise. Extensive trainings arranged for Company’s ERP and CC&B teams duly paid off, as it helped a great deal in adoption of methodology through strong project management and implementation approach based on the best practices. According to the tariffs of prominent IT houses, projects of such magnitude, if executed with the help of external consultants, would have cost well over USD 3 million.
The personal skill enrichments of IT team members involved in this project remained as a big bonus that can be further utilized in training the juniors in the team. These feats were achieved through the support of stakeholder departments and end users under the meticulous supervision of Company’s IT Chief Mr. Irfan Zafar who was ably assisted by Mr. Rauf Aslam Butt and Mr. Kashif Qadeer.