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American Electric Power:
Crisis Control Turns into Support and Enhancements
Due to the high demand for power, American Electric Power developed interruptible products designed to provide large customers with the extra power and return energy during AEP’s peak times. This required a high degree of instantaneous communications between AEP and their participating customers. A specialist software firm utilizing the platform independent language of Java developed the solution named Customer Communication System (CCS).
Once the solution was partly in place a competitor purchased the development firm and the staff that once was available to AEP was suddenly taken away. The prospect of reverse engineering and understanding the highly complex and undocumented system was overwhelming. The back end of this monster ran on Oracle, which was equally as complex as the Java front end. It seemed clear to AEP that the expertise of CRT was necessary to take on the task of supporting the CCS system.
CRT’s attack plan was on two fronts. First, CRT provided the immediate need for the technical competency with CCS to handle problems that arose in day-to- day business, thereby continuing the operations of the CCS product with AEP customers, uninterrupted. Second, document the system so that AEP staff could wrap their hands around it maintain it for themselves.
As CRT dove in to the system the complexities revealed themselves: ap-proximately 800 Java classes domiciled in a multi-tier system that relies upon direct TCP/IP Sockets communications using a proprietary messaging protocol. A custom-built business-rule-driven system (named the Business Object Universe or ‘BOU’) is used to enforce compliance of business logic between products and product states. Virtually no documentation was available to understand the architecture, it had to be reversed engineered, and documented, before necessary enhancements and support could be put in place.
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“CRT documented the system and demystified the complexities of the monster so that AEP staff could step in and support the system ourselves in the long term,” said Larry Hutchison of AEP, “additionally, they were able to step in and provide the much needed enhance-ments in a timely fashion.” "Now we can maintain the system on our own. That was very important to us, and was the most important delivery that CRT made!"
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