On March 30th, MECOMS™ has gone live at Essent Belgium. The new B2C business platform encompasses the contracting and switching, customer service and CRM, billing, credit management, accounting and reporting processes.
About Essent Belgium
Essent Belgium (www.essent.be) has been operating in the Belgian energy market since 2001 as an official electricity and gas provider in the three Belgian regions (Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels) with a turnover of 315 million Euros in 2008 and a workforce of 130 employees.

Beginning of April the new SCADA system for RRP (Rotterdam-Rijn Pijpleiding Maatschappij) in Venlo went live. The existing SCADA system (based on RTAP on a HP PA-RISC architecture) was migrated towards the newest Red Hat Linux environment with links to an external leak detection system and many different telemetry devices.

Rotterdam-Rijn Pijpleiding Maatschappij (RRP) was founded on 3rd April 1958 as a joint venture by a number of oil companies. They wished to transport crude oil over land from the tankers and the storage tanks in the  Europoort/Botlek area to the refineries in the Rhine-Ruhr area. For this purpose, pipelines are the most efficient, safe, reliable, and environmentally friendly means of transport. In 1960, the system for the transport of crude oil was commissioned. After the replacement of the Dutch part of the system with a pipeline with a larger diameter (from Europoort), because of required capacity expansion, the existing pipeline was commissioned for product transport in 1968.

On April 17th, MECOMS™ has gone live at Tawzea, a water utility in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.Tawzea is the first water company in the country to bill its customers based on metered consumptions. The first water meters are currently being rolled out in Saudi Arabia. MECOMS™ is used to map customers to the meters. These large B2B customers are invoiced on a monthly basis for Drinking Water, Waste Water & Recycled Water.

Ferranti has been a member of the VSGP, the ‘Vlaams Smart Grids Platform’ (Flemish Smart Grids Platform), since the beginning of April. Smart grids promise to be the greatest change with regard to our energy supply for more than half a century. A change that is urgently needed in order to successfully switch to renewable energy sources, and to keep our energy consumption under control. This challenge provides enormous opportunities for the business world. Many billions will be invested in the new infrastructure in the years to come. And this is but the start.

Dozens of companies – both ambitious new start-ups and established names – are ready to offer innovative services and products that provide you with the best from these smart grids, which will certainly be an essential component in the green economy of the future, where expansion and jobs go hand-in-hand with ecology.

The Flemish Smart Grids Platform brings all these companies together in order to make smart grids into a reality, and to roll out a smart network as soon as possible - initially in Flanders, but later on also far beyond our country’s borders.

MECOMS™ is Ferranti’s vision of involving consumers in the overall process of energy awareness. In order to do this, MECOMS™ has several interactive channels that are based on the requirements and profiles of the consumers. One of these interaction channels is television. No other device is used by so many people on a daily basis than television; at least one set can be found in almost every home in the country. Ferranti has developed an application in which, on the basis of Microsoft technology, consumer data is presented in an understandable language with a very low user threshold. Microsoft shares our vision. This application can currently be viewed in the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center in the European district of Brussels, where decision makers at various levels can join a tour of the solutions of tomorrow, including those relating to the question of the environment. 

On the 12^th of May, Microsoft launched Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Visio 2010 and Microsoft Project 2010 for companies worldwide. Over 90 million companies are now able to start using this new product suite and see their software investments translated into better productivity and cost-saving.

“Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 have set a new standard for the way in which companies all over the world use technology to save money, to innovate and to expand”, says Phillip Vandervoort, General Manager of Microsoft BeLux. “We have launched the new generation of productivity solutions that help users to work more quickly and more cleverly from any location and from different devices."

Inkendaal Hospital will also use SharePoint 2010 as records management system. By the link with Active Directory and the fact that users must log in, SharePoint knows which persons may have access to certain data. All information from the most diverse applications is now centrally accessible in one environment. This means that all patient records are brought together in one file, in which the patient takes central place. Furthermore, the Intranet will be given an overhaul, and Inkendaal Hospital will make use of the workflows in SharePoint 2010 to automate certain processes such as meeting requests.

Five years ago, Inkendaal Hospital constructed an Intranet based on SharePoint 2003. Today, the hospital wants to upgrade to the latest version, 2010, and it has very good reason for doing so.

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IT is both the backbone and Achilles heel of almost any major organisation and that is no different for the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB – Brussels Free University). Its 9,000 students and 2,700 employees need the right IT infrastructure to support their various activities. The requirements are high as, even in education, (international) competition is becoming more and more intense. IT provider Ferranti took on the task of swiftly making up VUB’s lost ground and turning it into a lead.

At the beginning of 2008 the VUB decided to completely update the IT infrastructure of its administrations. “Our aim was to increase the automation and computerization of the processes within our organisation,” states ICT Director Luc Van Buggenhout. “We initially charted these processes in great detail as the new structure had to be workable for all departments and promote cooperation between them.”

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