Nashville Electric Service (NES) is one of the 12 largest public electric utilities in the U.S. and offers rates that are among the lowest in the nation. The fact that NES was an early adopter of outsourcing has contributed to keeping its rates low. The organization originally outsourced its mainframe operations and management to a service provider in 1994. When the contract came up for renewal, NES turned to Atos Origin for lower pricing and improved service levels.

Nashville Electric Background

Nashville Electric Service (NES) began operations in August 1939 and distributes energy to more than 325,000 customers in Middle Tennessee. NES does not generate power. All electrical energy distributed to customers is purchased from the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest generator of electricity.

Although a non-profit business, NES contributes to the economic health of local governments. NES makes the largest tax-equivalency payment to Metro Government, and also pays in lieu of taxes to all other city and county governments within its service area. The NES work force consists of approximately 1,000 employees.

Business Challenges

Nashville Electric Services (NES) has a vision for the future — to, by 2010, be the #1 utility among its peers for customer and employee satisfaction. This means providing quality service, making it easy to do business with NES and keeping rates as low as possible.

NES originally outsourced its mainframe operations and management to a service provider in 1994. NES selected to transition the services to Atos Origin when the contract came up for renewal.

NES made the selection based upon the Atos Origin offer of lower costs, better processes and higher service levels, leading to better service for NES customers. Additionally, NES expressed that the Atos Origin culture is one of providing direct answers, integrity and honesty.

After a short three-month transition that went live during Thanksgiving 2004 holiday, Atos Origin provides NES with a dedicated LPAR on an IBM 9672-RA6 CPU processing environment configured to support the NES mainframe applications and able to support an upgrade to z/OS. Storage for the NES applications, the OS/390 operating system, temporary storage and all required software products is provided through 200 GB of EMC DASD.

The complete processing environment is available to NES 24 hours a day, 365 days a year except for mutually scheduled outages. This configuration is covered in the Atos Origin Disaster Recovery services, with annual testing of the recovery procedures for the NES mainframe environment.

Atos Origin provides outsourcing services that include the following activities:

• Data center management
• Standards and procedures
• System software migration
• System hardware and software maintenance
• Evaluation, installation, testing
• System tuning
• Technical support
• Problem management
• Change management
• Performance management
• Capacity management
• Problem diagnosis and resolution
• Batch production processing and scheduling
• Batch test processing
• Service level monitoring
• System programming support

The Results

Atos Origin has delivered a lower-cost solution that helps NES maintain rates that are among the lowest in the nation. The standard and best-in-class processes in place at Atos Origin have eliminated the problems experienced with the previous service provider that affected service to clients. This has made operations smooth for NES and has thus led to increased customer satisfaction. “Atos Origin did a fantastic job in transitioning the services from the former provider to the Atos Origin data center,” states Vic Hatridge, NES VP and CIO, “I am very impressed with the tight team, the length of time they have worked together and the integrity with which they deliver services.”