JERA
Formed following the merger of TEPCO Fuel & Power and Chubu Electric Power in 2015, JERA is Japan’s largest power company, with 76 gigawatts capacity. Once formed, the company immediately set about integrating data and devices.
Business goals
JERA developed a digital transformation strategy to achieve three goals:
- Unlock data silos to create unprecedented visibility across the company’s multinational operations.
- Transition from an on-premises to a cloud-only infrastructure model, integrating legacy and modern systems to create a central data repository for improving business intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities.
- Integrate thousands of devices across power plants, automating data management to gain granular insights into assets and to help develop new platforms for delivering greater customer value.
Integration Challenges
The company was facing challenges inherent in complex legacy architectures relying on IoT and operating at massive scale:
- JERA inherited multiple on-premises applications and disparate systems from its merger, resulting in a complex legacy infrastructure that needed to be overhauled with a simpler, more innovative, cloud-first environment.
- As a further complication, JERA has one of the world’s largest value chains – with operations spanning 10 countries – and stakeholders across this vast ecosystem rely on accurate, actionable data to avoid disrupting operations.
How Boomi Helped
Using Boomi’s integration platform as a service (iPaaS), JERA quickly replaced a series of highly complex point-to-point integrations that had been a burden on the company’s IT team.
Boomi’s low-code design helped JERA automate and centralize data exchanges between disparate legacy systems, allowing the company to migrate workloads to the cloud. Using Boomi, JERA integrated core business systems – including its SAP, fuel management, and Energy Trade Risk Management (ETRM) platforms – then migrated these systems to Microsoft Azure in just five months.
Results
JERA has centralized data from all its digital assets to gain unprecedented visibility across its multinational operations. With the Boomi Enterprise Platform, JERA has also:
- Accelerated the development of new integrations
- Integrated thousands of IoT devices and sensors at its power plants
- Implemented automated fault prediction, with a foundation to develop predictive maintenance
- Streamlined mandatory reporting to Japanese regulators and the Japanese Energy Power Exchange (JPEX)
- Supported a new commercial platform offering customers usage options, such as choosing traditional or renewable energy sources
