ERTH’s holistic and phased approach to Customer Information System (CIS) implementation and project management ensures system stability, user and business process readiness, documentation, and risk mitigation. From Project Kick-Off, Preparation and Business Blueprint, to Solution Development, Testing, and Go-Live, ERTH’s team of technical experts is there to support your organization every step of the way throughout the implementation project and into the future.
Since 1999, ERTH has completed CIS implementations for numerous Ontario utilities and currently provides ongoing support through our CIS Maintenance and Support Services for over twenty utilities. ERTH is proud to hold an Enterprise License Agreement with Northstar Utilities Solutions and is currently their largest business partner.
Our Approach
Phase 1: Project Preparation
- Start-up and Initial Planning
- Kick-off
- Technical Requirements Planning
Phase 2: Business Blueprint
- Business and Technical Requirements Analysis
- Business Content Validation and Gap Identification
- Design
- Establish Development Environment
Phase 3: Realization
- Develop and configure solution to satisfy technical requirements and gaps
- Load data
- Unit test solution and prepare for quality environment
- Define test plans and systems administration procedures
- Test solution and redesign or fine tune as needed for performance
- Develop training and documentation
Phase 4: Final Preparation
- Conduct training and prepare for production environment
- Define and execute cut-over
Phase 5: Go-Live and Support
- Solution go-live and production support
- Results and analysis
Project Management
Throughout the implementation, clients are supported by a dedicated Project Manager who is responsible for ensuring the overall success of the system implementation. The project manager will work closely with the client’s project lead and subject matter experts, along with the ERTH team of consultants and any other third parties. The project manager will hold regular project meetings, issue status reports, identify project risks, maintain and follow up on outstanding issues and maintain the project plan for the implementation using MS Project.
ERTH project managers follow a detailed project plan in order to ensure that project timelines are met and tasks are being performed in accordance to the agreed upon schedule.
Planning and Design
During the planning and design phases, ERTH Business Consultants will work extensively with your project consultants to undertake detailed planning in preparation for data conversion and beginning the system setups. We draw on our past projects to ensure that our clients understand the options that are available and how best to design the solution in order to achieve optimal outcomes. Throughout these project phases, detailed documents are developed in order to accurately capture the solution design. Work outputs include the following:
- Training Plans
- Solution Design
- Integrations Requirements
- Technical Environment
- Conversion Requirements
- Security Requirements
- Test Plans (Functional, UAT, Integration, etc)
- Parallel Plan
- Cutover Plan
Construction and Validation
After the planning and design are underway, the ERTH technical consultants will focus on construction and work with core project team members to execute the validation of results. ERTH Quality Assurance Analysts can also supplement your project team to become an extension of your testing resource pool. Our resources leverage technology to document our test results for your review.
In the Ontario market, numerous utilities use ERTH testing services as they undergo system upgrades and require test execution for Retailer related scenarios and MDM/R requirements.
Once ERTH testing is complete, clients will execute their User Acceptance Testing prior to moving into the final project preparation phase.
Transition Readiness
Prior to go-live, ERTH consultants will ensure documentation is complete, users are trained and parallel testing activities have been signed off as successful. ERTH documentation will go beyond that of system functionality, to include the business processes that have been agreed upon and are to be executed post-go-live. In addition, a sandbox environment will be made available to ensure that staff is provided ample opportunity to use the system prior to production deployment. These steps will ensure that the business and staff are ready for solution deployment, in addition to the system’s functional requirements.
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