» Southern Company recognizes Capricorn Systems, Inc. for OATTIS
Innovation, teamwork now saving time, money
Using a little innovation and teamwork, two Southern Company employees have helped greatly simplify and streamline the
process of filing open access transmission tariff rates, saving the company time and money in the process.
Patti Shaver, a senior transmission analyst in Southern Company transmission rates and analysis, and Genia Mitchell, staff
business analyst in Southern Company information technology, developed the Open Access Transmission Tariff Information
System (OATTIS). A patent has been filed for OATTIS through the Southern Company IT intellectual property program.
Tariffs are what other companies are charged for using Southern Company Transmission lines. The wholesale transmission
business brings in approximately $160 million in annual revenue for the company.
Twice a year, Southern Company files tariff rates with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and calculating that rate is
a complicated and formerly onerous process. When Shaver joined transmission accounting services a few years ago, she had
some ideas on how to streamline the process through additional technology.
"It was a labor-intensive process on everybody’s part, extremely technical," she said. The task for calculating the rate fell to principal financial analyst John Ehrhart, and it was all-consuming. He had to use more than 200 spreadsheets filled with data
from every operating company to come up with the proper rate.
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Genia Mitchell (center) and Patti Shaver (right) were honored at an IT awards luncheon hosted by CIO Becky Blalock.
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Shaver began to work with Mitchell and others in IT to come up with a program that was Excel-based and had a user-friendly
interface. The program also had to comply with complex FERC regulations and Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.
So Shaver and Ehrhart went on a fact-finding trip to all of the operating companies. Shaver’s idea was to come up with a
software application that would eliminate a lot of the redundancy in filing, simplify the process and make the data more
reliable.
Capricorn Systems was contracted by Southern Company to do the technical design and construction based on the system
requirements that Shaver and Mitchell developed by working closely with Ehrhart. Capricorn developed a prototype that
underwent testing, and the initial release of the new system went live in July 2008. Since that time there have been five more
releases; each with more functionality added to assist the open access transmission tariff revenue process.
OATTIS has exceeded expectations, improving the quality of the tariff filings and the integrity of the data and greatly reducing
the work-hours needed to calculate rates.
Two years ago, data entry for a true-up filing - the annual adjustment to the open access transmission tariff rate – took three
people 10 hours a day for a week. In April, the same data gathering was done by one person in less than one hour. Monthly
reconciliations are now done in 15-30 minutes by one person, when it used to take three people up to three days. The new
database replaced about 25 separate input documents for the monthly process.
Southern Company has signed a commercialization agreement with Capricorn Systems to market OATTIS to other utilities.
The system was unveiled at the annual Edison Electric Institute convention in San Francisco in June, with Mitchell and Shaver
attending as system experts, and got a lot of attention.
"We saw that were was nothing else out there," said Mitchell. "It was built and designed very generically, so it can be adapted
to other uses."
The best part of it all, according to Shaver, is that Ehrhart was able to go on a vacation without being a slave to his Blackberry
and laptop.
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