Tractebel upgrades management system and also obtains high availability
An upgraded environment, ready for future evolutions, and with high availability of systems. This is the main result of the project that the IT team from Tractebel Energia – biggest private, electric power generating company in Brazil, just finished implementing in July, with the help of Ninecon and collaboration of the users themselves.
Divided into two stages, the project involved investments in infrastructure, in new software tools and migration of the corporate management system (ERP) Oracle E-Business Suite to the version 11.5.10. The total investment was about R$ 1 million – amount that included purchase of equipments, software licenses and service contracting.
Reinforcement in infrastructure
In the first stage of the project, started in November last year and concluded in March, Tractebel established a new infrastructure for the Oracle 9i database - used by the company, and for the Oracle E-Business Suite system. “The objective was to give high availability to the environment”, states Eduardo Mayer Wageck, information and telecommunication system manager of Tractebel.
For this, the company doubled the number of servers—from two to four new Sun machines, equipped with Solaris 2.8 operating system, and installed the Real Application Clusters (RAC) tool of Oracle. “Before, one server ran the database and another ran the application. Now we have two servers for the database and two for the ERP, both working simultaneously", states Wageck.
The high availability of the database is assured by the RAC, which balances the load between both servers (in cluster) and makes the environment tolerant to failures. “This is very important for the business support functions, like maintenance and the operation itself of the 11 hydropower and heat power plants we have in Brazil", explains Wageck.
Defined together with the team of Ninecon professionals specialized in database administration, the solution also contributed toward increasing the level of security of Tractebel`s IT environment. According to Wageck, this was a requirement of great importance for the Suez Group (to which the company belongs), which has stocks negotiated in the New York Stock Exchange, and for this reason keeps its processes strictly aligned to the rules of the Sarbanes-Oxley Law.
New resources in ERP
With the new infrastructure, Tractebel began its second phase of its project: migration of the version of the Oracle E-Business Suite system. In this case, the objective was to keep the environment upgraded, so as to accompany the evolution of the Oracle application, and to facilitate new migrations. “We want to be ready for future upgrades of the application, which should combine the resources of various ERP packages acquired by Oracle, like the PeopleSoft & J.D. Edwards”, says Wageck.
In this stage, Tracetebel used the opportunity to install two new Oracle E-Business Suite modules. One of them is the Contracts application, which automates the management and elaboration of contracts with material suppliers and service providers. The other is Oracle Sourcing, which replaced the e-procurement tool Oracle Exchange, formerly used by the company. “With the Sourcing, we eliminated several customizations created for the Exchange and obtained a greater integration with the ERP”, states Wageck. In addition, there was reduction in the operating costs, since the support of this application is included in the contract with Oracle - before, Tractebel was obliged to maintain a specific support contract for the Exchange because of the customizations.
The entire process of migration and installation of the new ERP modules lasted only four months. The new system was commissioned on the 23rd of July, within the deadline and budget forecasted for the project. One of the reasons for this success, according to Wageck, is the strategy of avoiding customization, adopted since the Oracle application was installed by the company in 1999.
Another reason is the strong partnership, maintained for several years now, with Ninecon, which provided consultancy and support throughout the project - in the definition of high availability solution for the database as well as in the support and training of about 30 key-users who took part in the ERP migration. “The Ninecon team always showed competence and full mastery of the Oracle tools", states Wageck. “This was the third migration we conducted with it and, in all occasions, we were able to maintain the schedule and costs within the forecast”.
• TECHNICAL FORM
Customer:
Tractebel Energia
www.tractebelenergia.com.br
Profile:
Private, electric power generating company, part of the Suez Group, with origin in France and Belgium. Created in 1998, Tractebel is headquartered in Florianópolis and has 13 plants (six hydropower and seven heat power plants) in the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná, Mato Grosso do Sul & Goiás. It has installed capacity of 5,860 MW and produces 8% of the entire electric power consumed in Brazill.
Database:
Oracle 9i
ERP System:
Oracle E-Business Suite
Project:
- Upgrading of the infrastructure and installation of the Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC)
- Migration from Oracle E-Business Suite to the version 11.5.10
- Installation of Contracts and Oracle Sourcing modules
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