DTE Energy is a Midwest-based diversified energy company involved in the development and management of energy-related businesses and services nationwide. Its operating units include an electric company with more than 2 million customers in its part of the state. The client’s portfolio includes energy businesses focused on power and industrial projects and energy marketing and trading.
Our client
Challenge
The software platform DTE relied on to enable the development and execution of applications that process information in data streams was moving to end-of-life. They needed to at least replicate, if not improve upon, the current functionality for processing event streams and applying business rules for generating action, specifically for areas like outage notification.
Outage (and restoration) events, generated by smart meters and other IoT (Internet of Things) devices, were sent to DTE’s legacy outage notification system to generate alerts for the operations unit. The alerts could be for power outages, ground faults or meter voltage ratings.
DTE had a lot of challenges with the current application, prior to the end-of-life announcement. The system underperformed and became less reliable as the load of outage events spiked during storms, and the proprietary nature of the system meant the diagnostic activities were highly constrained. The news that the current platform was going to end of life was the final catalyst.
Action
Prolifics partnered with Databricks to build a complex event processing (CEP) engine on Azure to process real-time events from smart meters. Prolifics proposed the innovative Databricks platform solution to DTE and built a working prototype in just a few weeks.
The solution design is based on event driven architecture, completely modularized and follows open standards. The CEP solution can be integrated with the business rules engine in-house, and the platform can act as a business event processing platform for many more use cases to come.
“DTE Energy realizes the potential of building a platform solution for business events analytics. They can now leverage an already built Databricks Lakehouse solution to store the critical business events and build AI models with machine-learningworkloads. Databricks enables the handling of millions of historical events by leveraging delta lake on Azure Data Lake that DTE Energy has built. Open architecture lets it integrate with the business rule engine so the business cab build custom rules and generate next-best actions.”
Ajay Malgaonkar, Head of Engineering for Prolifics Global Delivery
Prolifics and DTE brought in all the stakeholders, including the cloud vendor architects and the Databricks technology team, to critically evaluate the solution before proceeding. DTE and Prolifics then worked in an Agile manner, to build and implement the solution before the current platform’s end-of-life.
Result
DTE realized the following benefits:
- Two times improvement in the mean response time to outages
- Reduction in false outage alarms and a 20 percent improvement in operational efficiency
- $300,000 savings in capital expenditures (CapEx) vs. purchasing a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) CEP product.
About Prolifics
Prolifics is a global digital engineering and consulting firm helping clients navigate and accelerate their digital transformation journeys. We deliver relevant outcomes using our systematic approach to rapid, enterprise-grade continuous innovation. We treat our digital deliverables like a customized product – using agile practices to deliver immediate and ongoing increases in value.
We provide consulting, engineering and managed services for all our practice areas — Data & AI, Integration & Applications, Business Automation, DevXOps, Test Automation, and Cybersecurity across multiple industries — at any point our clients need them. Visit prolifics.com to learn more.
