Business Situation
Operating and maintenance costs are strongly influenced by unplanned outages or breakdowns of technical utilities. Kommunale Wasserwerke Leipzig was working with a partly outdated network that was prone to unplanned outages. Long-term planning was necessary to achieve a systematic modernisation of the current network. Kommunale Wasserwerke Leipzig has committed itself to reducing the number of outages by 50% within five years. To reach this goal, an optimized process and outage reporting system was necessary.

Solution
The required outage reporting system is being jointly developed and implemented by Accenture and Avanade. The solution provides an integrated view of all outage logging, tracing, and management within one application. An SAP interface feeds this information into the commercial system and initiates the necessary activities for further handling and follow up.

The solution is based on Microsoft NET technology extended by the ACA.NET Framework (Avanade Connected Architectures for .NET). ACA.NET is a service oriented, multi-tier architecture that uses open standards such as XML and web services. ACA.NET guarantees a high degree of reusability and integration within an existing application environment. The Microsoft .NET plattform, consisting of Windows XP, Windows 2003, .NET Framework 1.1, and SQL Server 2000, ensures a cost-efficient and reliable usage of applications.

The solution also encompasses the development of an IT-based solution to plan and coordinate all necessary steps for a successful outage management and resolution.

Results
With this solution, Kommunale Wasserwerke Leipzig got a modern and robust outage management system based on a service oriented architecture. It is extendable through web service interfaces and can be adapted with minimal effort for future requirements such as EAI, mobile clients, integration with intranets and extranets and other enhancements that have already been defined today.

Using ACA.NET ensured a significant reduction in time and effort involved in implementation.It also guaranteed a stable architecture while reducing project risk.