Western Power Distribution: Critical utilities, behind the scenes

Western Power Distribution (WPD) is the electricity distribution network operator for the Midlands, South Wales and the South West.

The company delivers electricity to over 7.8 million customers over a service area of 55,300 sq. km. The network consists of 220,000 km of overhead lines and underground cables, with 185,000 substations. WPD’s role is to ensure the power network of poles and pylons, cables, wires and substations provides electricity to homes and businesses in the Midlands, South Wales and Southwest England around the clock. The company ethos of ‘Get it right, first time, every time’ combined with technical excellence and innovation have shaped the company’s business, making it the most efficient service provider out of all the UK’s electricity distribution companies.

The Challenge

As with many utilities companies, WPD relies heavily on intelligent software and IT services to manage critical aspects of its business. The company required an alternative approach to dealing with its software asset management, licence compliance and cost effective software acquisition for data management, reporting and workload scheduling. The existing method was time consuming and tied up valuable human resource to manage the interactions with the vendor whilst maintaining control and compliance. In addition to this, issues with spiraling management licensing costs required addressing, to enable IT to align software spending with its business priorities.

Solution

In order to alleviate ever-growing software licensing costs, reduce operational overheads and improve the efficiency of software asset management and licence compliance, WPD selected to move to a Celerity SaaS contract.

Managed via the Celerity UK Service Desk, the SaaS contract consolidates vendor storage management licensing into one seamless contract; improving value and producing operational savings by reducing vendor management, licensing and contract costs, higher levels of service and limited risk to services being delivered by the organisation. The contract proactively manages and verifies increasingly complex software licence compliance, whilst reducing unnecessary licence fees to optimise spend. Custodian provides all of the benefits that WPD requires in order to address its business goals and objectives.

Why Celerity?

Celerity is a trusted and strategic partner to Western Power Distribution and has continued to deliver value on technology and service-led projects with a firm focus on driving out both technical and commercial risk in order to maximise efficiency for the organisation.

Due to its success in delivering these projects, Celerity was chosen as the partner of choice for this requirement and was able to demonstrate a significant cost reduction for the customer in the first 12 months of the Custodian solution.

Celerity was able to demonstrate effectively the commercial advantages of moving the licence management to a consolidated but flexible Custodian contract, removing complexity, cost and time that could be better spent focusing on core competencies and goals for the business.

As an experienced and flexible partner, Celerity realises that things can and do change, therefore, it ensures that client needs are dealt with and the changes are managed through a structured, yet flexible, contractual approach.