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Constellation Energy is one of the nation’s largest wholesale power sellers, with a diverse collection of power plants located throughout the United States. Seeking an effective change management solution for its PeopleSoft environment, Constellation Energy leveraged Stat for PeopleSoft from Quest Software.
The Challenge
The IT environment at Constellation Energy includes Sun file servers running Oracle databases as well as PeopleTools 8.45 and HRMS 8.8.1. The company also runs an enterprise-wide business information system called TIBCO.
“One of our handicaps was our inability to go back in time and restore a project,” said Alexander Jebarathinam, PeopleSoft Administrator. “For a complex project, we had very minimal rollback options available. Restoring a previous version to see what changes were made and who made them was complex.”
According to Jebarathinam, there was also no easy way to generate a report describing a project’s history. “It was hard to get things documented, and the workflow was in such disarray that only a few people had information about a project’s status,” he said. “Having meticulously organized documentation is critical for us not only because of our management policies, but also because of our need for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.”
Constellation Energy needed a strong rollback capability across a project’s multiple versions, a way to generate reports via a historical database and a means of easily meeting its Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. The company also needed a solution that would seamlessly integrate with PeopleSoft, as well as provide better version control while automating the workflow.
The Quest Solution
After extensive research, Constellation Energy selected Quest’s Stat for PeopleSoft as its change management solution. “We evaluated a few other tools, and we’ve been live with Stat for close to two years now,” said Jebarathinam.
Stat provides software revision control and versioning capabilities as well as process management, change request tracking, and distributed development support—ensuring operational excellence and compliance to regulatory standards. Stat helps organizations keep up with change configurations and customizations, including updating, approving and deploying instances throughout the PeopleSoft implementation lifecycle. Stat adds visibility, hides complexity and automates much of the work involved in change management.
Stat is the only change management solution that can natively manage both PeopleSoft proprietary objects and flat files. Stat is also currently validated to integrate with PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.49 and below.
Stat’s powerful rollback feature helped Constellation Energy’s developers when they needed to troubleshoot a project. “Rollback is one of Stat’s critical pieces, and it’s outstanding,” said Jebarathinam. “We had a project with a lot of complex PeopleSoft code. Before Stat, it could’ve taken hours waiting for the fix to be in place. With Stat, in two simple clicks our development and functional teams verified an issue. It couldn’t have taken more than a minute. It was that easy, and we had very little downtime putting the fix into production.”
Constellation Energy uses Stat’s automated workflow, and customized workflows to fit the company’s specific needs. Said Jebarathinam: “We’ve set up five different workflows in Stat—so the workflow capabilities are extremely important.”
In addition, Stat enabled Constellation Energy to more easily comply with Sarbanes-Oxley. “We have a Sarbanes-Oxley requirement to track and document any project being migrated,” explained Jebarathinam. “Without Stat, we just couldn’t get there. It helps us create the reports and provides us with the information we need for any Sarbanes-Oxley audit.”
The Bottom Line
Stat has allowed the IT team at Constellation Energy to simplify migrations and roll back to any version of a project, while automating workflows and reducing the time it takes to generate audit reports.
“Stat is a great product to help the migration process,” said Jebarathinam. “And anyone using Stat for migrations doesn’t have to be extremely PeopleSoft savvy. IT employees can jump on board and learn Stat in a week or two. It’s a piece of cake.”
Rolling back to previous versions was the IT team’s big concern, according to Jebarathinam. “That mechanism is vital to us, and Stat has given it to us,” he said. ”This saves a whole lot of development time, especially on complex projects.”
For Sarbanes-Oxley, Stat provides issue-tracking capabilities, as well as a central repository for documentation. “Our management team views our ability to keep audit trails and generate audit reports as the top priorities,” says Jebarathinam. ”And Stat delivers.”
As for project management, any user can track the status of any project at any given point with Stat. “This capability has really eased a burden for the functional team and has certainly reduced a lot of administrative steps,” said Jebarathinam.
Constellation Energy also credits Quest Professional Services with providing knowledge and best practices for getting maximum value from Stat. “The Professional Services representative gave us a lot of good documentation and showed us how to support Stat ourselves,” said Jebarathinam. “He did a great job building in the workflows and was savvy enough to really explain all of the tools. We all asked him every question in the book, and he was very patient and answered them all.”
About Constellation Energy
Headquartered in Baltimore, Md., Constellation Energy is a Fortune 200 company and is the nation’s leading supplier of competitive electricity to large commercial and industrial customers. It is also a regulated distributor of electrical and natural gas in central Maryland.
About Quest Software, Inc.
Quest Software, Inc. delivers innovative products that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases and Windows infrastructure. Through a deep expertise in IT operations and a continued focus on what works best, Quest helps more than 50,000 customers worldwide meet higher expectations for enterprise IT. Quest offers the only adaptive application and services management solution that connects business services to infrastructure, end user to database, and production to development to unify IT and the business. Quest Software can be found in offices around the globe and at www.quest.com.
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